Food and Laughter

Dilli delicacies

2012-01-11T05:53:00.000-08:00

Last week I finally managed a wishlist item and went to Chandni Chowk with friends, by the Metro, much the sanest way to get there. I hadn't been back since I lived in the Red Fort during my first year of college, so Chandni Chowk certainly looked very different from what I remembered. We found our way to Dariba Kalan, passing vendors selling yummy-looking guavas and vegetable sellers who had beautifully packed mushrooms, broccoli and baby corn side by side with cholia and other purely desi veggies.

I spotted a cart selling Daulat ki Chaat as soon as we hit Dariba Kalan, and I was thrilled. I had been reading about this winter delicacy for years! Daulat ki chaat sounds like the kind of thing you'd expect indulgent nawabs to have invented - the froth is whipped off of boiling milk and left out to cool under the stars overnight, so the early morning dew soaks into it and helps it set. This is then whipped up with a few rose petals, slivers of khoya, bhoora and saffron to form an ethereal mouthful, like early morning clouds of a hopeful dawn, tinged with the red-gold of the sun. It dissolves on the tongue in seconds, leaving behind the merest hint of its grace to tantalise your tastebuds.

Once we'd indulged in that and some jewellery shopping in tiny shops along Dariba Kalan, we headed for Parathe wali Gali. One of my friends had recommended that we go to the third shop in the lane. Sadly, it's not much of a Parathewali gali anymore, and the third shop down was the only one to be offering the said Parathas. They had all kinds, though - karela, bhindi, mirchi, matar, khoya, kela etc along with the more traditional aloo, gobhi, mooli.

We decided to be adventurous and only go for the exotica - starting with Karela, mirchi and papad, then moving on to malai, matar and so on. The meal consists of kaddu ki sabzi, tari wale aloo, sukhey aloo and gur-imli ki chutney with bananas along with the assortment of parathas. As it turned out, the one traditional one we ordered - the mooli one- was a big letdown in erms of flavour, but all the others were fabulous, leaving me dreaming up combinations of my own to try out at home. Though the parathas were deep-fried, they weren't heavy. Four of us ate about 9 of the parathas, washed down with Pepsi but didn't feel weighted down by the meal when we left.

Highly recommended: Papad, mirchi, kaju parathas; kela paratha for dessert. Do carry tissues/ wet wipes and if you're particular, some sanitizer.

Experiments with food

2011-12-19T07:02:00.000-08:00

Watching Masterchef Australia and then Masterchef USA, if you're at all a foodie and someone who enjoys cooking, it's hard not to get inspired and think about plating and flavours and experiments...so I've been back in the kitchen a bit lately, stirring away. And here's what I came up with - a cheesy farfalle with broccoli, snowpeas and peas - a hit with the children, fried Borek stuffed with spiced apples, Szechuan green beans topped with Chinese fried eggs...and hopefully more to come.

There are no pictures of the Farfalle or the Borek - they vanished too quickly. Hopefully someday soon, though, I will put up pictures of the green beans. Meanwhile, recipes:

Farfalle
I cook about a cup dry farfalle per head
1 cup shelled peas, for 6 people
Two handsful snowpeas
2 cups broccoli
1 tbsp olive oil
1 garlic clove, finely chopped
1 tbsp chili flakes and dried oregano
Grated parmesan - 1 cup
Any other cheese - 1/2 cup
6 tbsp plain allpurpose flour
1.5 cups skimmed milk
Salt and pepper to taste

Put about a liter and a half of water on to boil with about 1 tbsp salt and a few drops of olive oil in it. Once it comes to a rolling boil, add in the farfalle and let cook, stirring occasionally, until the pasta is al dente - you should be able to slide a fork through the pasta but it should hold the fork firmly. Drain out the water and put the pasta back in the pan; top with a dash of olive oil and stir so the pasta is coated lightly with the oil - that keeps it from becoming an unappealing lump.

Meanwhile, steam the broccoli and the snowpeas. Boil the peas until soft and keep aside. Put the olive oil on to heat ( not extra virgin, just plain); when hot, add in the garlic, oregano and chili flakes; toss in the steamed broccoli and snowpeas and stir for a couple of minutes on high heat and remove.

Put the milk on to heat in a saucepan on low heat. Slowly add in the flour, tbsp by tbsp, whisking away so it gets nicely absorbed and doesn't form lumps. Add in the half cup of cheese - we had blue cheese lying around so I used that - and whisk until fully dissolve. Assemble the farfalle - add the cheese sauce to the pasta, toss in the veggies, top with grated parmesan and pepper; taste to check the salt is ok and serve with a smile :)

Healthy desserts

2011-11-28T03:04:00.000-08:00

Watching Masterchef Australia seems to have released some of my suppressed-due-to-laziness urges to cook and create. So I came up with this sunshine dessert over the weekend, which had the added benefits of being healthy, pretty, simple and liked by the kids!

Ingredients:
Hung Curd ( yogurt) - 1 liter
Powdered sugar - 2 tbsp
Peach slices - fresh or tinned ( if tinned in syrup, wash them else they can be sickly sweet)
Frozen raspberries/ blueberries - 1 cup
Pine nuts- handful, peeled and toasted

Tie up 1 liter of fresh curd/ yogurt in a thin linen cloth and leave out for about an hour, until most of the liquid is drained out. Add the powdered sugar to the hung curd and mix well. In wine glasses - because it looks so pretty and is easy to serve - put in a good dollop of the hung curd. Top with two peach slices. Add a spoonful of the rasps/ blueberries. Add another dollop of the hung curd. Sprinkle on the pine nuts. Serve!

This makes enough for 6 people. (Pic will be posted sometime soon)

Tomato-rasam soup

2011-09-06T22:22:00.000-07:00

Puds has been busy passing along her cold to the rest of the family including me. I was feeling low yesterday and decided I needed the spice-kick of a traditional saaru but without the heaviness of the dal etc. So I came up with a new take on tomato saaru, which works wonderfully as a soup, and kicked the cold on its head!

Ingredients:
4-5 medium sized tomatoes, chopped
2-3 pieces of garlic, chopped
2 tsp rasam powder
1 tsp chilli powder
1 tsp oil
2 cups water
Salt to taste
Tempering: 1 tsp ghee, 1 tsp mustard seeds, 1 pinch asafoetida and handful of curry leaves

Heat the oil in a pan, pop in the garlic and stor on medium flame. When the garlic turns translucent, add the tomatoes and cook until slightly softened. Add the rasam powder, chilli powder and water and bring to a boil. Turn flame to low and keep at a rolling boil for a few minutes, then switch off and let cool.

Blend it all into a smooth soup. Heat the ghee in the pan, add mustard seeds. When they splutter, pop in the curry leaves. Add in the soup and heat. Serve garnished with coriander leaves, finely chopped.

Desi Margaritas

2011-03-20T08:28:00.000-07:00

My soul-sis was throwing a brunch to bring in her 40th birthday and rang me up a day before to ask me to come up with a signature drink for the party. I immediately flashed back to something I'd seen a friend drink during my recent Sri Lanka vacation and decided I could improve on it. So we made Tamarind Margaritas, or Tamaritas. And for those of you with Indian tastebuds or a liking for tongue-tingling, this is a winner! It tastes fabulous, goes well with Indian or other spicy food and is refreshingly different.

Ingredients:
One fistful of Tamarind, soaked in about 500 ml warm water
4-5 tablespoonsful sugar ( or to taste)
1-2 tablespoons of chilli powder
Vodka or tequila - 500 ml
Crushed ice - about half kilo

Let the tamarind soak for a couple of hours. Then squeeze it thoroughly into the warm water so all the flavour is released. Strain it and then add sugar - it should be strongly sour and sweet, remember you're going to dilute it with ice and vodka. Add the chilli powder - it should be enough to give you a hit of heat at the back of the throat but not enough to make your tongue burn, so add chilli powder slowly! Refrigerate until nice and chilled.

Mix equal parts of vodka, the tamarind juice and crushed ice. Serve in glasses rimmed with salt - use rock salt for an added kick. Decorate the glass with a split green chilli and enjoy!

Tip: To rim the glass, dip the rim in lime juice and then in salt. The easiest way I found to crush the ice was to wrap the cubes in a clean cloth and have at them with a pestle.

Shundal for MLLA Nov 2010

2010-11-02T05:20:00.000-07:00

I love, love, love legumes, beans and so on. Am forever shopping for exotic varieties of the same when I travel and a recent thing that made me so happy ( it's always the little things, isn't it?) is finding cans of butter beans, aduki beans, haricots and so on at a nearby supermarket, which didn't cost the earth either!

But for Dussehra, I made a traditional savoury dish which is served in the evening to friends who come for arshna-kunkuma and to see the display of dolls - shundal. It's a lovely, simple dish and yet so flavourful and addictive. My entry for MLLA November 2010 hosted by Lisa of Lisa's kitchen and started by Susan of The Well Seasoned Cook.

Ingredients:( serves 4)
1 cup black chickpeas/ kala chana, soaked overnight in water
1-2 green chillies, cut into small pieces
Handful curry leaves
1/2 tsp asafoetida - heeng
1 tsp oil
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 fistful of freshly grated coconut
salt to taste
Lime juice - 1 tsp or to taste

Pressure cook or otherwise boil the chana until soft and cooked through. If you want it very soft, add a tsp of baking soda while cooking. Heat the oil in a wok. Add the mustard seeds. Wait until they splutter, then add the green chillies, heeng and curry leaves. Add the chana and stir for a minute or two. Remove from heat and add salt and lime juice to taste. Top with grated coconut and serve hot or at room temperature as a healthy snack or with a meal.

I have no pictures of the shundal but can provide one of the doll display!

A series of homely feasts

2010-09-30T20:30:00.000-07:00

I have hardly been food-blogging but that doesn't mean I haven't been eating. In fact, for the past three or four days, I have been relishing the most amazing food - all home-cooked, healthy and simple, but so soul-satisfying. I have literally been pigging out on the fruit of my own labour, which is rare. Usually when I cook something, I can't really tell how it tastes and have to depend on the palates of others! All I can do is to taste during the cooking process and ensure the flavours are as I like 'em.

So it started with an experimental saaru on the weekend. I have always loved the flavour of garlic. And years ago, one of my aunts served us the most delicious tomato-infused saaru that I have ever tasted. Going through the cookbook dakshin, I came across a recipe for tomato saaru and since we had bought a large quantity of lovely, ripe red tomatoes, I thought the time was right. Of course, I didn't follow the recipe at all!

I diced 4 tomatoes and sliced two green chillies lengthwise. Then I decided to add garlic to the mix - 8-9 cloves of skinny Indian garlic. I sauteed the tomatoes, the garlic and green chillies in a tsp of home made ghee. I added this to the regular mix of tamarind extract and dal ( whizzed in a blender along with 1 cooked tomato) and saarina pudi( rasam powder), skipped the Mysore touch of jaggery and topped it all with a tempering of mustard seeds and curry leaves in ghee. Divine!

One day we had Zuni stew made with pumpkin of just the right stage of ripeness and sweetness. So simple and so deeply satisfying.

A couple of days ago, I had a great craving for Moollangi huli ( Radish/ Daikon/ Mooli Sambar), a traditional favourite during winters. We had bought the first moolis of the winter a few days ago so they had been calling to me! Mom suggested adding methi( fenugreek) leaves to the sambar to add even more flavour. green-leafies junkie, I was only too pleased, thugh having no methi on hand I made do with kasoori methi( dried methi). That adds the bitter flavour but is much less flavourful than fresh methi, so I guess this dish will have to be made all over again as soon as methi hits the market. The sambar turned out every bit as delicious as my fantasies, so I ended up gorging on it. ( Made the same way as any sambar - cut the mooli into 1/2 cm slices, boil in water until just tender, add cooked arhar dal, tamarind extract and sambar powder and top wth a tempering of mustard seeds and curry leaves).

We had also brought home a copious harvest of brinjals (eggplant/ aubergine) of various kinds - the long, slim purple ones, the small purple ones, the big purple ones and so on. I read a delicious sounding recipe for Rasavangi ( eggplants in gravy) in Dakshin and decided to give my favourite veggie a new twirl. Fab, fab, fab. Reminiscent of Gojju - the tamarind-jaggery-spice mix which we have with khichdi, yet with much more body ( green chillies, fresh coconut + coriander seeds, ground together; + a bit of arhar dal). Yum, yum, yum!

Yesterday, for Bojjandi's 2nd birthday lunch, I decided to make pooris with vegetable korma. My grandma has a recipe for korma eschewing onions and using cashews, but since we love onions, I decide to go for the hotel version. Easy to make, and wonderful!

Ingredients:
1 cup diced carrots
1 cup beans, cut into inch long pieces
2 potatoes
Half cup green peas
2 tomaoes, diced
1/2 fresh grated coconut
2-3 green chillies( depending on degree of hotness)
Handful of coriander
1 inch fresh ginger
1 small onion
1 tbsp poppy seeds
2 inch piece of cinnamon
6 cloves
1 tbsp fennel seeds
1 tsp oil
2-3 bay leaves

Cook the rest of the vegetables in salted water until cooked through but still firm. Add the tomatoes and simmer for 1-2 minutes. Meanwhile, grind together the coconut, chillies, ginger, coriander and onion with a little water to make a smooth paste. Dry roast the poppy seeds, cinnamon, cloves and fennel seeds and blitz together into a fine powder. Add the paste and the powder to the cooked vegetables and let simmer for a few minutes. Heat the oil in a small wok. Add the bay leaves and saute for half a minute. add to the vegetables.

The Korma tastes fabulous with pooris, dosais, idlis and especially set dosais.

Eggs Ahoy

2010-06-29T23:29:00.000-07:00

Whoever has been reading this blog is probably well aware of my love-hate relationship with eggs. But I've been asked by a dietician to have a 1 egg, 1 toast dinner 3 nights a week in my nth attempt to lose weight. So obviously that's a great excuse for me to experiment with more egg-delights.

The way I make omlettes, learned from my brother-in-law, makes them a sumptuous meal - even with just 1 egg. But this week I wanted to add a little more body to them without making them fattening. Luckily, this type of omlette works well with whatever you have lying around in the kitchen/ refrigerator. So what Chubbocks and I had for dinner two days ago was a luxurious omlette stuffed with makai-palak, with grilled tomatoes on the side. Heartily filling and satisfying to the tastebuds as well!

Makai palak is a typical vegetable served in restaurants and this time at home, instead of opting for a plain old palak paneer, I asked my cook to add the corn into it. It turned out delicious, with the sweetness of the corn adding a dulcet note to that of the spicy/ astringent palak.

Makai Palak recipe
1 cup corn nuggets, boiled until soft
1 bunch palak, washed but not dried and roughly chopped
1 onion, chopped
2 cloves garlic, peeled and chopped
1/2 inch ginger, chopped
1 tomato
1 tsp cumin seeds
2-3 green chillies, chopped
2 tsp oil
Salt to taste

Heat the oil in a wok. Toss the cumin seeds in and wait till they brown. Add the green chillies and onion and cook over medium flame, stirring from time to time until the onion turns translucent. Add the tomato and cook until soft. Add the palak and cover the wok and cook over medium flame for 7-10 minutes until the palak is well wilted. Wait to cool, then blitz in the mixie until you get a fine puree.

Add back to the wok, then add in the corn and salt and cook until hot. Serve immediately, with rotis, bread or rice.

I prefer not to add turmeric to palak as the colour stays a fresher green that way.

Omlette with makai-palak

Break an egg into a pan. Add 1 tbsp milk and beat for 30 seconds until well mixed. Add a small blob of butter into the frying pan, with the heat on high. Add the egg mixture and turn heat to low. Cover the pan tightly and cook on low for 7-8 minutes. Remove the cover and top omlette with whatever you like - onions, green chillies, cheese, coriander. Let cook until well done, i.e. no liquid-ey bits of egg on the top layer.

This time I topped mine with sauteed onions, green chillies and a tablespoon of the makai-palak and then folded the omlette over.

A note on tomatoes - if using desi ones, just cut into 1 cm thick slices and grill/ griddle on a separate pan with a bit of salted butter. Serve on the side, topped with freshly crushed pepper - if you add them to the omlette raw, they are likely to make the omlette runny.

Great Beginnings...

2010-05-31T21:31:00.001-07:00

Some time ago, when I was shopping at a nearby Mother Dairy, a lady who spotted me with a bunch of drumsticks asked what I do with them. She said she had only ever seen South Indians or Bengalis buying them. I told her they make a great sambar, or aviyal, so she asked me, Do you cook South Indian very often and how and so on. Naturally it tumbled out that I was a South Indian, so the next thing you know, she's asking me, "Do you know how to make dosas? I can never get them right." I said I always botch mine too while spreading them on the tawa. Then she asks, "So what proportion of urad do you use to rice?" "I haven't the faintest. I only make them from the MTR mix", I confessed to which she shook her head in disbelief. "I've never heard of a South Indian who uses the ready mix", before disappointedly going off.

Honestly, I confess, I do regularly and freely use the MTR idli and dosa mix. They spare me the pain and the time of soaking, grinding, then fermenting and then waiting to see if things turned out right or not. MTR's ready to eat food sucks, the North Indian dishes in their repertoire, rather, but their khaara bhaath is another winner. When we lived in France, on Sundays after our grocery shopping and walking home lugging heavy bags that cut grooves into our fingers and an extended session of house cleaning, we'd have khaara bhaath for a sumptuous and satisfying lunch.

MTR's rava idli mix is another winner, the catch being that you have to put in the right amount of sour curds ( yoghurt). The recipe printed on the pack specifies about 750 ml per 500 gm pack but I like to put in about 900 ml - basically, enough so the idli batter has the consistency of honey or pancake batter. That way the idlis turn out super-moist and light. Another trick is to ensure one doesn't overfill the idli moulds - put in enough to barely cover the cup, it definitely should heap up on top.

Today, with something as simple and yet perfect as rava idli, we've had such a great start to the day that it seems like the rest of the day will be awesome. I mixed up a batch of MTR's rava idlis, duly liquid-ey. We made a simple coconut chutney sans coriander leaves today. And I had made the classes huli ( sambar) with sambar onions yesterday in preparation. Add to it litchis, cold from the fridge, rich with juice and sweet as honey, fresh watermelon juice, the kids eating in blessed and rare silence, and a brisk breeze wafting in from the garden...And such a sense of wellbeing flooded us that it seemed like, at that moment, we could ask for nothing more in life.

Recipes

Rava Idli
I packet MTR mix ( will yield up to 30 idlis)
900 ml sour yoghurt
Pinch salt

Mix half the yoghurt into the idli mix, along with the salt. Wait for 2 minutes, then mix in the rest of the yoghurt slowly and blend well. Make sure the batter has the texture of pancake batter.

Grease the idli moulds lightly. Add about 250 ml of water into the pressure cooker. Pour the batter into the greased idli moulds ( don't heap the batter in), and steam in the pressure cooker, with the whistle off, for 12-14 minutes. Take the moulds out and let cool slightly before using a knife to prise the idlis out. Serve hot, topped with homemade tuppa (ghee).

Coconut chutney
I fresh coconut, grated
3-4 green chillies
1 lemon-sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1 cup warm water
Handful of roasted chana
1 inch piece of ginger
Pinch hing ( asafoetida)
1 tsp urad seeds
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp vegetable oil
1 handful curry leaves
Salt to taste

Squeeze the tamarind so it releases all its pulp into the water, then strain the water. Grind together all the ingredients with half cup water until finely ground.

Prepare seasoning: heat the oil. Then add the mustard seeds and wait until they splutter. throw in the urad seeds. When they are pale brown, add in the heeng and the curry leaves and switch off the stove. Quickly pour on top of the chutney, add salt and mix well.

Huli/ Sambar
1 cup arhar dal, cooked until soft and then whisked
2 cups sambar onions, peeled and then parboiled in salt water, strained
2 tbsp sambar powder
1 limesized tamarind, soaked in half cup warm water, squeezed and the water then strained
1 limesized jaggery lump
Salt to taste
Pinch turmeric
1 tsp chili powder
1 handful curry leaves
1 tsp mustard seeds
1 tbsp vegetable oil

Put a large saucepan on to the heat. Add in the arhar dal, sambar onions ( store the water for thinning out the sambar later, if required), tamarind water, sambar powder ( instructions for making it are on my blog someplace), jaggery, turmeric, salt and chili powder and bring to a boil. Let it boil for 5 minutes and turn off the heat.

Make the seasoning by heating the oil, tossing in the mustard seeds and waiting for them to splutter and then throwing in the curry leaves. Add the seasoning to the huli and serve hot.

Healthy Chaat - MLLA 23, Weekend Herb Blogging

2010-05-04T06:40:00.000-07:00

I love chaat. I can have it any time of day/ year...but the only thing that is a hindrance is that most forms of chaat are made of fried goodies - aloo tikki, papdi, fried potatoes...Given my constant attempts at losing weight and at eating healthy, that does pose a problem.

But recently while having some failed dahi wadas at a friend's house, I had a brilliant inspiration. The things that are really fabulous about chaat and that make it so tongue-ticklingly fab are the contrast of flavours - sweet, sour, spicy and salty - and textures - crisp, soft, mushy all at once. How about recreating that in a calorie-friendly form?

So here's what I came up with, and it was a huge success at a lunch party - so cuccessful that it's become standard lunch fare for me in this hot Delhi summer.

Recipe
Ingredients:
Green chutney
Date-tamarind chutney ( sonth)
Yogurt
1 chopped onion
1 cup sprouted moong beans
Chaat masala ( optional) - 1 tsp

Mix the sprouts with the onions. Add the chutneys and yogurt and mix well ( check if salt level is right, you might need to add some). Top with chaat masala, if desired and garnish with a few green grapes cut in half, or pomegranate bits. You can also add a sprinkling of sev if you like.

Green Chutney
Given my love for green leafies, I love chutneys that are green. This one is simple and a winner - I always have some on hand in the fridge and the freezer, and it goes with everything - toast, sandwiches, rotis, pakoras, chips...

1 handful coriander( just chop off the root end of the stalk, but you can use the rest of the stalks)
1 tbsp raw peanuts (I prefer using the ones with skin on)
3-4 garlic pods, peeled
Juice of 1 lime
2-3 green chillies, depending on how hot you like it

Just blitz until it becomes a smooth mix and add salt to taste

Date-Tamarind Chutney
Chaat cannot be made without this tongue-tantalizing chutney, which blends the sweet thickness of dates with the tartness of tamarind to form the perfect Indian melange of sweet, sour, salty. I got this recipe from Tarla Dalal's chaat cookbook. This can be stored in the fridge for upto 1 month.

Ingredients
2 cups dates deseeded
1/4 cup tamarind deseeded
1 cup jaggery, grated ( or use brown sugar)
1 teaspoon chilli powder
a pinch asafoetida (heeng)
Salt

Wash the dates and tamarind and place them in a saucepan. Add the jaggery, chilli powder, asafoetida, salt and 4 cups of water and simmer for 20 to 25 minutes. Cool and strain the mixture through a sieve. Use as required. Store refrigerated.

The measurements given here should work - remember that the taste has to be aggressively sweet-sour.

This is my entry for MLLA23, hosted by the original creator of this wonderful event, Susan of The Well-Seasoned Cook , and for Weekend Herb Blogging # 232, hosted by Lynnylu.

Restaurant Reviews

2010-02-02T02:57:00.001-08:00

Visited lots of new food outlets in the past few days so need to post my reviews.

We saw a mention of a new dessert place called Whipped, right near the place we were gong to for Fondue, so decide dessert would be tried out there. Whipped is a cute and tiny little place, with lollipop stripes on the walls and just a few chairs if anyone wants to sit and have dessert. They have a tiny little balcony which would be useful in winter but I guess won't be populated in summer. They have a wide selection of dessert for such a small place, from homemade icecream in flavours like strawberry cheesecake and berries to actual cheesecake in many flavours, cakes and truffle cones - which are truffle chocolate swirled into icecream cones and topped with hundreds and thousands.

A chose the Bailey's cheecake and I, with my fondness for berried, picked the strawberry cheesecake. Puddi swithered between cakes topped with chocolate or fruit and finally picked a truffle cone. We found the desserts...very ok...not an overwhelmingly delicious experience, unlike Whipped's neighbour Gourmet Affaire which does a Tiramisu to die for. The cheesecake was as good or as bad as ones we had had elsewhere, and not a stand-out experience. Puddi's truffle cone was a nice, new thing, but she found it too much for her and it's still standing around in the fridge. The prices were middling...we paid about Rs. 350 for 3 desserts. But all in all, it's not a place I'd head to specially for dessert.

E 552, Main Road, GK II, Delhi

On Sunday we had dinner at Spaghetti Kitchen, which has opened its first Delhi outlet in Select City Walk Mall. The restaurant is very spacious and done up in a sort of nondescript modern style. It doesn't look particularly Italian or anything else, but is a soothing ambience.

Chubbocks and Puddi wanted Pizza so they ordered a thin-crust pizza with chicken and red and yellow capsicum. I and A ordered a Penne Vodka to share, and we ordered parmesan-rosemary creamed roasted potatoes.

The food came really fast, starting with the bread which came about five minutes after we settled in and followed by the potatoes in another five minutes. They had roasted tiny baby potatoes with rosemary until they were butter-soft and then coated them in a creamy, Parmesan sauce. It was a delicious starter, highly addictive in its soothing flavours, and even Bojjandi duly mopped up his share of it and more.

A and the kids relished the pizza while I dug into the Penne Vodka, which was a standout. I have a lot of pasta in tomato sauce since I prefer tomato/ pesto to cream sauces so I wasn't expecting too much, but this was a new taste experience. The Vodka sauce had a slight bitter base to the flavouring, which nicely offset the tang of the tomatoes, and they served ample amounts of sauce so I didn't have to ration it out to serve all of the penne, and even had enough to mop up with some crusty bread. Again, the flavours were lush and highly addictive.

The service was also great, as they quickly understood our need for a high chair and brought one out. The food was served fast and the waiter was assiduous in replenishing our water and our dishes, and extremely friendly and polite.

Overall, the Spaghetti Kitchen surprised us by giving us a fabulous experience in terms of food, service and speed. What's more, at about Rs. 1400 for the meal ( no drinks/ desserts), it's pocket friendly too. I thought, given how much Italian food we end up eating, that only places like Diva or Olive would be capable of delighting us, but this restaurant proved us wrong, and it's a place I'd definitely head back to.

Spaghetti Kitchen, 2nd Floor, Select City Walk Mall, Saket, Delhi

Zuni Stew

2010-01-30T09:54:00.001-08:00

I am re-posting this as an entry for No Croutons Required, hosted by Lisa this month. Zuni stew is a stew prepared by Zuni Indians who lived in New Mexico - this is my version.

Hi Kiddos,

I just wanted to tell you about the Zuni Stew we had for dinner over the weekend. I first tasted this on a visit to the US, at a new little restaurant called Spoon River Cafe. I loved the taste of it, and the amazing colours, so I decided I had to make it for you guys at home.

I felt it was particularly appropriate for dinner this Saturday since we would have gorged on cheese Fondue at Diva. At least, I knew dad and I would need the burst of wholesomeness that this dish would provide, and unlike many 'healthy' foods, it doesn't taste or look bland and boiled. In fact, it looks fabulous and is something I plan on feeding dinner guests in the future, since I have shifted to a 'no-fuss-entertaining' way of life.

I have to say, I loved shopping for it, buying the tiny orange pumpkins which the shop told me are referred to as 'disco' pumpkins. The orange and red capsicum, as you know, are my favourite, and I also love buying white onions - they look like giant pearls. The green capsicum and coriander add that dash of deep, rich colour, and the sweet corn kernels add their sweetness to that of the pumpkins. It was almost like therapy to cut each vegetable...to decide whether the dice should be large or small, depending on how fast that particular vegetable gets cooked, to add them one by one, knowing which one needs more cooking time and which less...inhaling the smell of the spices as they warm up in the oil and start smelling aromatic instead of harsh...

And the stew lived up to my expectations from the meal - colourful, flavourful, zingy and yet totally, sumptuously healthy! And guess what? I've taken some of my best food pictures ever with this dish. I know that's not saying much, but for me it's a huge improvement! And what's more, you fusspots had no trouble spooning this down with rice - Yaayy!!

Ingredients:

1 cup garbanzo beans

1 small Pumpkin, skinned and cut into chunks ( about 600 grams)

1-2 onions, chopped

1 red bell pepper, diced

1 yellow bell pepper, diced

1 green bell pepper, diced small

2-3 garlic cloves, minced

Half cup of sweet corn niblets

Handful of chopped fresh coriander

1 green chili, diced

1 cup garbanzo beans (chholey)

1.5 tsp cumin powder

1 tsp coriander powder

Salt to taste

Dash sugar if pumpkin isn't sweet

1/2 liter water

1 tbsp vegetable oil

Soak the garbanzo beans overnight, if you're not lazy like me. (Umm, I don't know if I should admit it to you kids...but then you should know this by living with me, right?)

Heat the oil in a deep casserole dish. When hot, add the cumin and coriander powders and fry on medium until you get a warm aroma. Add the minced garlic and saute until the garlic is soft but not brown. Add the onions and the green chili and cook until soft. Pour in the water and add the garbanzo beans and salt. Let it simmer until the garbanzo beans are almost cooked and then add the pumpkin. Adjust the water if you need - it shouldn't be too liquid. Once the pumpkin is almost done, throw in first the green pepper, then after 5-6 minutes the red and finally the yellow pepper and the corn. Let it simmer until the yellow pepper is cooked but not pulpy. Throw in the fresh coriander and simmer for one more minute.

Serve hot with, if you want to be authentic, corn bread but if counting calories, any multigrain country-style crusty bread.

Of course, that's the way you are supposed to make it. I like shortcuts, so here's what I did:

Cooked the garbanzo beans in the pressure cooker( 1 whistle). Sauteed the onions, garlic and green chile with the spice powders and then threw in the pumpkin. once that was almost cooked, added in the garbanzos and the peppers one by one and topped with the coriander.

You can also serve it on a bed of rice, or eat it just by itself, with some fruit for dessert if you want to feel particularly healthy.

Tip: You can adjust the level of heat depending on how hot the chili is, by adding chili powder ( or not).

Love,

Mom

This is my entry for My Legume Love Affair, hosted by Rachel of The Crispy Cook. I love this event, started by Susan of The Well Seasoned Cook, because, as you kids know, I''m nuts about beans and always running around buying unknown varieties wherever we visit.

Pistou - Grow your Own January 2010

2010-01-20T03:58:00.001-08:00

No, that's not a typo for Pesto. Pistou is apparently a Provencal dip-type thing that's made of similar ingredients to pesto and added to bean soup. I made a Provencal style bean soup last week and since I have a glut of basil leaves in my garden, decided to make some Pistou to go along with it. The soup was all right but the Pistou was so good that I've used the leftover drizzled on all kinds of things – crudités, a baguette slice at breakfast, with potato chips…just about anything. And it's definitely something I'm going to be making time and again. Here's how:

Ingredients:

Basil leaves – 1-2 handsful (depends on how much you want to make)

Parmesan cheese, grated – 1-2 tbsp

Olive oil – 1 tbsp (I'm one of those low-fat people so always looking to substitute oil)

Water – as needed

Just wash the basil leaves and then whizz everything together in the blender and store in the fridge for dipping into.

This is my entry for Grow your Own January 2010, hosted by House of Annie

Sweet potatoes

2010-01-19T04:25:00.000-08:00

I am a huge fan of potatoes but have never much liked sweet potatoes, especially in a curry form. The only way I have enjoyed them until recently is as chaat, served up with spicy chaat masala and nimbu and cut-up pieces of tart starfruit. However, in my quest to broaden my food horizons, I began experimenting with different was to cook this vegetable. It all started with baking the sweet potatoes wrapped in foil and then taking the foil off partway through the process to allow the natural sugars to ooze out and form a crisp, shiny, sweet crust. Then I started serving up baked sweet potatoes topped with a dip – either hummus, or Greek Tzatziki…

However, over the weekend, when I was left with a glut of baked potatoes and sweet potatoes, I decided to re-roast them in wedge form. I drizzled rosemary-flavoured olive oil onto a pan of wedge-cut sweet and plain potatoes and filled up the spaces in between with fat pieces of garlic, with the skin on. I sprinkled some salt and freshly ground black pepper on top and popped them into the oven at 100 degrees C for about 20 minutes – until they looked crisp and reddish.

What was amazing to me was that the sweet potatoes tasted better than the plain ones, what with the skin having turned crisply sweet yet juicy. We didn’t need any other accompaniments to this, and even the kids gobbled it up sans demands for ketchup. Definitely a do-it-again dish.

Gunpowder

2010-01-19T04:15:00.001-08:00

Yesterday I had lunch at a wonderful restaurant in Hauz Khas village. Hauz Khas village has been a much-loved haunt of mine for many years. My BFF and I and later A and I used to love going there on weekends, browsing through countless tiny little stores crammed with interesting jewellery, art, knick-knacks and designer clothes. Experimental restaurants would spring up there, from Ritu Dalmia's first venture, Mezza luna, to one whose name I can't remember that used to feature live jazz and Italian food. The Bistro always housed restaurants serving North Indian food, and then there was Naivedyam…

But I haven't been back there in a really long time, so it was fun to land up there for lunch with friends yesterday. Mansi took us to Gunpowder, which serves South Indian food – and not the standard idli-dosa-sambar, though you will find dosa and sambar on the menu. The menu here is more eclectic, from aapams (without the mandatory stew) to Malabar parottas, kadala curry kerala style and Andhra style gunpowder. The selection of non-vegetarian is quite extensive too.

We ordered pepper rasam which comes with two papaddams apiece – it was spicy, sour and laced with garlic, heaven on a cold winter's day. Quixotically though, they refused to serve us just the papad without rasam, even though we offered to pay extra, and said we could only get it with another order of rasam! We over-ordered out of sheer greed and hunger – aapams with kadala curry and spinach-toovar-garlic dal for veggie me, chicken ghassala and mutton korma with Malabar parottas for the carnivores, and gunpowder on the side, as well as plain rice.

The food came really fast, which was a blessing. The aapams with kadala curry were divine – didn't even notice the absence of stew – though the spinach toovar dal was a bit ordinary. The carnivores loved the non-veg and went at it with gusto. The gunpowder was served with oil though not til oil, whose fragrance I missed, and it was an excellent, highly spiced version. The kadala curry is already making me anticipate another visit to the restaurant – it was spicy and coconutty all at once. The downer was the filter coffee – had no fragrance and tasted foul, no matter how much milk and sugar we added to it. Another thing that didn't sit well was the service – the waiters were poorly informed and unable to even pronounce the names of the dishes, let alone make intelligent recommendations.

However, after trekking up four narrow flights of stairs, we were well-compensated by the incredible view over the Hauz Khas ravine. The restaurant looks out over the baoli or lake, which is beautiful right now, with some trees sunken into the water, and a vista of far-away trees painted in misty blue-green hues by the winter haze in Delhi. Just being there in that environment would have been enough for a great meal, and the delicious food was an absolute bonus.

A meal for four cost us Rs. 1500 approx, excluding dessert.

Looking back at 2009, foodwise

2010-01-01T03:13:00.000-08:00

I had some awesome food experiences last year, both dining out and cooking at home. I had amazing Chili in Seattle, which I then recreated at home. I also bought lovely cherries covered in chocolate - truly sensual. Later this year, in Minneapolis, I had Zuni stew at the Spoon River Cafe, which I will blog about at some point, and also the most flavourful beans dish at one of Minneapolis' heritage restaurants, Szechuan green beans, which I plan to try and recreate tomorrow.

The Olive restaurant in Delhi moved back to its original, wonderful location in Hauz Khas,and A and I had a romantic dinner there on his birthday. One of the best things about that meal was when they brought a mortar and pestle filled with roasted garlic, extra virgin olive oil and herbs and we got to make our own dip to go with freshly baked bread hot from the oven.

Cibo was a lovely experience on our anniversary in terms of ambience and service, though I thought the food was nothing extraordinary. I wish I had known it was open-air so I would have dressed more warmly, but otherwise it was a great evening.

I discovered three tastes last year which I found delectable and hope to keep enjoying. The first was raspberries. In India, people often confuse ras-bhari ( physalis) for raspberry, which are very different fruit. I had tried rasps on occasion but probably never knew how to select them so hadn't quite cottoned onto their taste. But frozen raspberries gifted by a family friend made their way into A's birthday dessert and I was hooked on to everything about them. Their tart yet sweet taste. The aroma, reminiscent of the best summer roses. The texture, with the grainy seeds and the smooth puree...I even had the raspberry puree by itself as dessert for days after, and it was heavenly.

Peanut butter was something else I discovered after years and relished for the first time. With chocolate, with gongura pickle, on toast or by itself.

One more taste explosion that I have been gluttonously relishing is that of kino or Malta as it is commonly known here. This was a fruit we never enjoyed growing up, because peeling it like an orange just takes too much time and effort. But while at an otherwise dull Romanian food special, I came across Maltas cut into sections, and found their taste almost intoxicating - the sweet-sour juiciness, the fresh, clean feel of the little niblets of fruit...So ever since then they have become staples in our fruit basket, and the kids, A and I can happily tuck into some Maltas anytime.

I hope 2010 brings more such culinary adventures my way. I'm waiting with a clean and eager palate...!

Christmas Desserts

2009-12-26T05:39:00.000-08:00

Did I ever tell you about how I came to work at a French creperie? Well, it all started when I graduated from High School in Singapore a year ahead of time. We knew we were moving back to India but the Indian Government had been up and down about Dad’s posting dates, so we didn’t know exactly when we’d be back. So I’d taken extra courses and graduated early and now I was underage for college in India so I had nothing to do. One day when mom and I were out at a mall, she spotted a sign asking for assistance at a French bakery so she egged me on to put in a one-line resume and our phone number. The next thing I knew, they called me for an interview and I was hired as the girl manning the crepe stand at the food court in the Metro mall on Orchard Road.

The crepe stand was a new venture by two young Frenchmen in their mid-twenties. I of course only remember the name of the one on whom I had a crush – Bruno. His partner used to be the manager of the stand I worked at. We had about 6 square feet of space at a small supermarket, and it consisted of a table with a crepe machine sitting on top and space below to store paper plates and so on. My job was not only to make the crepes but also to wander around the food court giving samples out to entice customers into buying them, because they were new to Singapore.

When I began working there, Bruno and his partner had exactly three fillings for the crepes – butter and sugar, butter and jam and jambon – ham. They asked me to try and come up with new fillings, so my friend from school, Ginger - who worked at the yogurt stand next door that summer - and I used to brainstorm to come up with new flavourings. Cinnamon was one flavor I remember Ginger coming up with. We came up with banana, and chocolate (Nutella), then banana-nutella, granola…Ginger and I used to have a lot of fun coming up with these during our lunch breaks.

I remember all kinds of funny things happened at that crepe stand. First, one day the batter finished and when I called my boss to tell him that, he just said, “Well, buy it from the supermarket”. I was flabbergasted and spent a good hour wandering around in search of the batter before it occurred to me that language may have gotten the better of us and called him to say it was the batter – crepe mix – that I was talking about and not the butter – le beurre. It got so confusing for him that I wrote out the old tongue-twister, Betty Botter bought some butter and gifted it to him. Another time, I noticed that every day by about midday, the batter, if it had been left over from the previous day, would start smelling bad and then the crepes would start coming out spoilt – they wouldn’t spread easily but drop out in little gobs and stick to the crepe machine surface. At first my boss thought I was doing something wrong, and then we both started getting puzzled about it. Then one day my boss figured it out – the supermarket manager used to turn off all the electricity at night, including for the refrigerator where the leftover batter was stored.

It was fun working at that stand, and I got to make a decent amount of money. The crepe machine was a doddle to operate – you filled the batter in a little rectangular pan that stood at one end and ran on wheels. You brushed some butter on the hot surface and then pulled the rectangular pan from one end of the hot plate to the other, applying pressure evenly to a pair of handles – kind of like pliers’ handles – that stuck out from the long sides of the rectangular pan, and that meant that a small crack opened up on the floor of the pan and poured out an even thickness of crepe batter along the hot plate. Brush a little more melted butter onto the crepe, dust caster sugar/ jam or jambon onto the crepe, roll it up using the spatula and serve up with your best French smile!

I even learned to make crepes flambé, which was spectacular, especially in the relatively bland environs of the food court – douse a butter and sugar crepe in rum and set it alight. The showmanship came in folding up the crepe even as flames were shooting out – you had to be really fast – and serving it up onto a plate. Every time a large crowd was in the food court, I’d flambé a crepe and then the next hour or so be flooded with orders.

We didn’t end up having crepes too often while we lived in France. I think we were so starved for spicy snacks and food, that sweet stuff just didn’t appeal to us at that point. And I’d never made crepes from scratch by myself. But the thought of making crepes suddenly occurred to me yesterday morning as I was debating what to make for Christmas lunch. I usually put on a spread that involves a fair degree of work, mostly because I have a tiny oven so any meal that involves baking more than one dish becomes a production and a masterclass in timing. And I like making what I think of as typically continental fare for Christmas – though vegetarian – baked vegetables, quiches, pies, potatoes dauphinoise – that sort of thing. But this year I’ve been so exhausted lately and last night we were out late for our anniversary dinner and then up early for Christmas present-opening with the kids so I was making a simple meal. Crepes seemed like the perfect way to end it – simple yet flamboyant and exotic.

They were surprisingly easy to put together from scratch, and very easy to make. Even better, they need really careful monitoring of the amount of butter used – my kind of recipe! Too much and they won’t come out right. I started out with butter and sugar ones, then for the kids I made two with Nutella. But I really wanted the flambé, reminiscent of Christmas pudding, so I cut up some oranges in half and made one crepe with sugar and orange halves, folded it up, smothered it in Benedictine and set it alight. That was a spectacle, alright, with flames shooting high up.

I don’t have great pictures, because you get the best effect with the lights turned down low, which means I’m groping in the dark for the matches and by the time I’ve found them half the liqueur has caramelized away and so on. But I’d highly recommend this super-easy dessert for a small gathering. It looks incredibly complicated and oomphy, tastes great and, like all my favourite recipes, you can ring in your own changes. For instance, tonight we had some batter left, so in remembrance of an amazing liqueur we’d bought at Freiburg once, I made crepes Flambé with orange peel and kahlua – truly delicious. I wouldn’t be surprised if crepes made with Nutella topped with Frangelico taste fabulous – an adult chocolate experience – or ones doused in Godiva…the possibilities are endless!

Ingredients

1 cup plain flour

1 egg

3/4 cup of milk

For flavouring:

Caster sugar

Orange peel/Cut oranges/Thinly sliced Apples/ Nutella/ cinnamon powder

Tablespoon of liqueur for flambeing - you can use any clear liqueur, from Kirsch to Frangelico, Kahlua...

Make a paste of the egg and flour and gradually add in the milk, whisking slowly to avoid forming lumps. Keep aside for half hour.

Use a nonstick pan for making the crepes. Take 2-3 paper towels and dab a bit of butter on them, and rub the paper on the frying pan. Be careful to use only the minimum butter needed to grease the pan.

The batter should be pouring consistency - use a few more teaspoonsful of milk to thin it out if needed - it should pour easily from a jug. Pour some batter into the frying pan and swirl the pan around to coat completely.

Pour off excess batter if any.

Sprinkle some caster sugar on the crepe.

Add oranges/ orange peel/ whatever. Fold over the two sides towards the middle.

Douse in the liqueur and, working quickly, set it alight and serve up.

With practice, you can serve it up while flames are still shooting up, which looks phenomenal. You should turn the lights down before you flambe so it looks even more spectacular!

Poached pears

2009-11-17T01:03:00.000-08:00

I had read about this at premium restaurants but never tried it, so a couple of weeks ago, I finally decided to try it out. The dish certainly looks really pretty, no? And it's pretty simple if you ignore the long marination period (2 days). So while not a dessert to be thrown together for an impromptu evening, it's certainly one to be tried for a formal event.

Ingredients:

2 pears - firm but sweet

Red wine - enough to immerse the two pears in

1 stick cinnamon

3-4 cloves

1 tbsp sugar (depending on sweetness of pears)

1 tsp lime juice

Vanilla icecream to serve, as an option

Skin the pears, leaving the stems on and marinate in a tall jar with enough wine so the pears are immersed. Turn them over after a few hours if you are placing them sideways. After 24 hours, take out the pears carefully, and put the wine on to heat at a simmer. Add the cinnamon and the cloves, the sugar and let it simmer for about 15 minutes before turning off the heat. Add the pears back and let it marinate for a further day in the fridge.

Serve on a plate, or - my preferred option - in a wine glass. If you like, you can place a bed of vanilla icecream in the glass before resting the pear on it. Feel free to drink up the spiced wine as is or heated up - mulled wine at its best!

Festive Meals

2009-11-09T03:49:00.001-08:00

My parents home, while incorporating many cosmopolitan elements in terms of décor, style or menus, has remained pretty traditional when it comes to festivals. And in my quest to preserve some traditions in a relatively non-traditional family, I like to make meals on festival days very traditional and South Indian.

South Indian Brahmins are vegetarian, so the food served on festival days and occasions like weddings is vegetarian. In fact, as strict Brahmins, many South Indians avoid even onions and garlic in their cooking, believing them to have Tamsik elements which are incompatible with the pure thirst for knowledge and detachment that is supposed to be the goal of Brahmins. Even vegetables which are considered 'foreign' or earthy, like potatoes, are avoided on festival days.

Festive meals include one sweet item, a dal-based gravy dish like huli or saaru, kosambri – a salad made of julienned cucumber or finely grated carrot, or sometimes soaked chana dal or moong dal and dressed with lime juice, green chilli, chopped coriander and fresh grated coconut and seasoned with a mustard seed-curry leaves and heeng garnish, a dry vegetable, typically beans or ladies finger and rice. In my mother's home, a flavoured rice of some kind is de rigueur – lemon rice, tamarind rice or a rice spiked with a special pulao powder and mixed with a special selection of carefully chosen vegetables – tinda by itself, or green peppers with peas, fenugreek leaves by themselves or peas when the fresh peas really kick in. Even the order in which things are served on the plate and eaten has a special significance.

We start by serving a spoonful of the sweet – kheer, sajjige or whatever else in the bottom right. The kosambri at the top left. On the right of the kosambri comes the dry vegetable. Below the sweet comes a spoon of fresh homemade tuppa or ghee. A mound of plain rice is served in the center of the plate. The saaru or huli is served next to the rice. The spiced rice is usually served to the left of the plain rice.

The meal starts with the head of the house making a ceremonial ring of water drops around his plate, and then everyone begins their meal. The first morsel to be eaten has to be the sweet. Once that is finished, everyone is free to move on to whatever they want to eat, but a repeat helping of the sweet is necessary after the saaru-anna has been eaten. And we end the meal with curd-rice.

This year, for Deepawali, as mom was in the US with my sister, we all ate at our place, dad included. The sweets included payasa made with poppy seeds, sajjige – a halwa made with cream of wheat, and dad brought one of his favourite kannadiga desserts – kesari bhaat, or saffron-rice. I made saaru which my kids love, and lemon rice which is easy for everyone to eat, and for the cook to make.

Poppy seeds payasa is something that I never cared for as a child. It's only as an adult that I have developed a taste for it, and now I find the complex flavours delicious. It's also an easy one to make and healthy as it uses jaggery instead of sugar. And after the scramble of getting up early to do an oil ceremony for everyone, bathing and then rushing through the cooking in time to participate in the puje, I find its promise of sound sleep extremely beneficial J.

Poppy seeds Payasa

1 tbsp poppy seeds

1 tbsp rice

½ grated coconut

4-5 tbsp of jaggery, or to taste
1 tsp powdered cardamom
400 ml water

Soak the poppy seeds and rice in a little water for half hour. Blend with the coconut in a mixie until finely blended. Add to the water and set on to boil. Add the jaggery when it starts boiling, and let it simmer for 5-7 minutes after that. Top with the cardamom powder.

You can garnish with roasted cashews or slivers of coconut before serving. Tastes good, hot or cold!

Baked Vegetables

2009-10-29T05:23:00.001-07:00

Back in the '80s in India, whenever people had parties, it was time for them to display culinary chops by way of serving unusual dishes from other cuisines. Those were the years characterized by menus which would have rajma chawal and paneer side by side with a Chinese Chop Suey, a dessert of agar-agar-laced China Grass or the ubiquitous baked vegetables, amongst the few households that owned such an esoteric piece of equipment as the oven. The baked vegetables would typically be a mix of potatoes, carrots, cauliflower and peas in white sauce topped with Amul processed cheese. I personally never liked the dish as I found it limp and the mix unappetizing.

Today's menus take in a much larger territory and typically try and serve everything from one type of cuisine, unless it's a buffet or a multi-cuisine banquet. So it's far more done to find a meal of Chinese, Thai or regional Indian cuisines at dinner parties, and baked vegetables, if served are in a context of similar dishes. In fact it's quite rare to find baked vegetables on any menu because they are passe. But done well, they can be delicious and interesting.

At the vegetable market over the weekend I found onion flowers and leeks which were reasonably priced, as well as Brussels sprouts which I love served baked with cheese. So last night when we had guests over for dinner, I thought it might be fun to try a combination of all three vegetables in a baked dish. The mixture turned out really well, though if I made it again I'd increase the quantity of Brussels sprouts, as otherwise they can tend to get lost in the mix. The sweet, meltingly soft roast onions are a wonderful contrast to the slight bitterness and chewiness of Brussels sprouts. This is definitely something to try again.

Ingredients:

1 pound onion flowers, cut into inch-long sticks

1 pound Brussels sprouts (I used about 100 gms yesterday and found it less than I wanted), cut into half cm rounds

500 gms leeks, cut into 1 cm thick rounds

1 tsp vegetable oil

200 gms light cream

½ cup milk

1 cup grated parmesan cheese

Salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 150 degrees C. Mix the milk, cheese, cream, salt and pepper well. Roast the onion flowers in 1 tsp vegetable oil until wilted and soft but still vibrant green. Layer an oven-proof dish with the onion flowers, followed with the Brussels sprouts and then the leeks. Pour over a quarter of the cream-cheese mixture. Continue layering until all the vegetables are used up and end with a top layer of the cheese-milk-cream mixture.

Bake for 50 minutes – 1 hour, checking from time to time, until the top layer is lightly browned. Serve hot

Nature’s feast

2009-10-26T08:34:00.001-07:00

It seems to me as we grow older, that there are two ways we can evolve. One way is to eschew everything about the natural state, and run screaming in the direction of Botox, facelifts and steroids, hoping to stave off the process of ageing itself. The other way is to go in the direction of vintage wine, ageing gracefully and allowing the bounty of nature given by God to mature and ripen and offer its deepest and most complex flavours. Of course, making sure that one is not corked!

In the same way, as I grow older, I seem to appreciate the beauty and bounty of nature more and more. Be it the contrast between the dark green, old-looking and rough-edged leaves of the Har-shingar tree juxtaposed with the fragility of its star-shaped white flowers laden with perfume, standing proudly on their bold-coloured orange stems or the abundance of fruit and vegetables that grace our markets in every season. On Saturday, I visited my favourite vegetable mandi in Munirka, near the Malai Mandir and was almost transfixed by the sheer variety of vegetables and fruit available. As usual, I was greedy and bought more than I think we can eat within a week, as the market is a little out of my way. But the luxury of being able to choose so many fresh, naturally ripened vegetables and fruit is one that I never cease to appreciate.

There were all kinds of exotic and mundane things available – from the kannadiga favourite seeme badnekaayi or Chayote, to onion flowers, looking like frailer versions of asparagus, to tender young asparagus itself. Leeks, white onions, sambar onions, spring onions and red ones. Sweet potatoes, new potatoes and ordinary ones. Five kinds of eggplant or brinjal, from the big, round one used for bhurtas to long purple Japanese ones, tiny green ones prized by the Thais, small purple ones perfect for Bagaare Baingan to slim, delicate looking white ones. Fresh greens, from Bibb and iceberg to lollo rosso, a big bunch of spinach, a bunch of methi or fenugreek greens, rocket, dill, coriander and some red leaves that I don't know the name of. All kinds of squashes and root vegetables, from sweet potatoes to yams to taro…The fruit stalls too were full, for once, with fruit ranging from Indian green pears to yellow Bartletts which I promptly bought for the purpose of poaching in red wine, pomegranates from Afghanistan, large and bursting with juice, red-cheeked apples and star-shaped disco papayas, oranges and custard apples, Maltas or navel oranges and persimmons, and of course, the humble yet much-loved banana…

I came home laden with bags full of farm-fresh produce and I can only hope that we manage to eat everything we bought before it goes bad. But the experience of buying and being able to select from such abundance, and more, cooking the produce in such a way as to bring its flavours alive without killing it in an overdose of oil or spices, and then enjoying every mouthful…Ahhhh, there is nothing that produces a greater sense of well-being.

For the past few days, I have been indulging in a guilty pleasure once the kids are on their way to the park. I shut the door behind them, revel in the momentary blessed silence, then head for the kitchen to rootle out a Malta and a sharp knife. I quarter the fruit and settle into my favourite armchair. Then I greedily stuff a piece of the fruit into my mouth, sucking the sharp, sweet-sour juices and enjoying every last drop as it dribbles into my throat and think, "Gar Firdaus bar rue zameen ast, hameen ast, wa hameen ast", Babar to the contrary!

First Birthday Food

2009-10-01T05:46:00.000-07:00

My youngest, Bojjandi, turned one yesterday. It was bitter-sweet - on the one hand I was happy I had managed to keep him alive given two siblings under six with a habit of strewing tiny toys around the house and not knowing their own strength. on the other hand, my littlest baby was also getting ready to move into toddler-hood, baby no more. I almost thought it was time for baby # 4 but the prospect of divorce and/ or working until the age of 95 made me decide 3 was enough to be going on with.

For his first birthday party, the food had to be something that he could eat. Moreover, I had had pest control done just two days before and the kitchen was lying strewn all over the dining room, so it had to be an easy menu. Finally I decided simplicity was going to be key and fixed the menu: Idlis with huli and coconut chutney, rice flavoured with vegetables and menthedittu, and carrot cake.

The Carrot Cake was a new one on me but I had been wanting to make one for quite a while, and when I saw the recipe in one of my favourite recipe books, I found it was healthy too - wholewheat flour, carrots, orange juice and vegetable oil. It turned out really well, though it was flatter than I expected, as I had baked it in a wide cake pan. I frosted it simply with cream cheese flavoured with honey and orange juice - something which didn't tax my cake-decorating skills of which, to say they are meagre would be high praise. And proof of the deliciousness of the said cake was Bojji gobbling it up and wailing loudly for seconds :)

Carrot Cake recipe

Ingredients:

2 cups wholemeal self-raising flour, or with 2.5 tsps of baking powder added

3-4 carrots, grated and squeezed dry

1 cup vegetable oil

1 cup caster sugar

1 tsp nutmeg powder

1 tsp cinnamon powder

3 eggs

1 cup walnuts, powdered (optional)

Zest of 1 orange and its juice

Beat together the orange zest, OJ, sugar and eggs until light and frothy. Add the vegetable oil, flour and spices and mix well. Add in the carrots and walnuts and mix together. Pour the cake batter into a greased and lined 8" baking pan and bake at 180 degrees for 1 hour - decide n baking time and temperature based on your oven's idiosyncrasies. Mine required baking at 160 for 35 minutes and the crust was close to burnt.

For the frosting, beat together 225 gms cream cheese with 2-3 tbsp honey and 1 tbsp OJ. You can also use this to sandwich the cake together and then top with Royal or Marzipan icing. Decorate as wished...

Back again

2009-09-21T05:18:00.000-07:00

Have been off blogging for a long while thanks to not having a laptop...Now I've finally got one so here I come. Lots and lots of posts have been revolving in my head for ages...

One of the first things a resourceful and experimentative cook needs to learn is the fine art of 'jugaad'. Jugaad is an Indian term signifying street smarts - the art of using what resources you have at your disposal and accomplishing what you need to accomplish, without waiting for the perfect solution to present itself.

Recently A's birthday came up and I had had no time to preplan what I was going to do that day. A is not a chocolate cake fan, unless it's a special recipe, like my Chocolate Chestnut bombe, or the Chocolate fondant cake, so I racked my brains to come up with something he would like that would be interesting to make too. I had also been pondering my stash of frozen raspberries for a while, wanting to find something evocative to do with them.

As it turned out, I found a wonderful recipe for Almond Cake in Nigella Lawson's How to be a domestic goddess. It uses a cup of almonds, blitzed into powder, with eggs and sugar. It's typically made in a bundt pan, so the shape itself looks festive.

Simple: Beat together 4 egg yolks with 1 cup caster sugar. Add vanilla and the powdered almonds. Beat the whites until stiff and fold in. Bake in a nonstick bundt pan for one hour at 160 degrees centigrade (keep an eye on the cake while it's baking as each oven is a little different).

Well, at least that's what I thought. So I beat the yolks and whipped the whites and folded away and set it to bake. About 50 minutes later the cake was done, so I set it out to cool. Only to find that once cool, the cake simply would not emerge from the pan in one piece. Of course, I hadn't happened to have had a nonstick bundt pan so I had used an ordinary round pan copiously lined with wax paper, but given the moist and sticky nature of this cake, that didn't work. I might add, I had substituted powdered ordinary sugar as I was out of caster sugar - I am not one of nature's planners...

So here I was with great hunks of a sticky cake - not festive looking! Now what to do? The the thought of the raspberries jumped into my head and I decided to make a jugaad version of English trifle, with cream and raspberry sauce.

I took out my Spanish red and gold glass bowl and tossed a few hunks of almond cake into the bottom. Then I topped it with lightly sweetened beaten light cream and topped it with raspberry sauce, made by whipping defrosted raspberries with a little sugar, as the rasps were a little sour. I carried on layering until all the cake, cream and rasps were used up and chilled it until the rasp sauce was well set.

It turned out to be a fabulous concoction, with the sour-sweet raspberry sauce cooled by the whipped cream providing a lovely contrast to the sweet and moist cake. What do you think?

Middle eastern

2009-06-05T01:39:00.000-07:00

I love Middle-eastern food. I first discovered it on my first visit to the US. My friend took me on a tour of New York, walking around all the famous avenues and streets and we finally wound up in the Village that evening for dinner. She ordered food that sounded strange – Baba ghanoush, falafel and so on – but because I knew she was vegetarian, I was safe and so eager to try it out. I fell in love with the fresh, light and zingy flavours but there was at that time no chance of getting anything similar in India. Many years later, when A and I moved to France, any time I felt too tired to cook, we'd go to the nearby Lebanese and order a take-out meal that sort of replicated a typical Indian meal. There was Baba ghanoush – similar to our beloved Baingan ka Bhurta, Mujaddara – lentils cooked with rice, akin to our Masoor Dal, and Pita bread.

Somewhere during that year we also discovered many other lovely flavours of this region – the parsley and Bulghur wheat salad and of course Hummous. I loved the simplicity of the hummous and its contrast with almost anything I could dip into it – crunchy crudités, chips, bread, croissants…It was a rediscovery of the humble Chickpea. Once back in India, we found many more restaurants serving hummous and other middle-eastern food items, but rarely did I find one with Hummous to my liking.

So much so that I've started making my own hummous and freezing large quantities so we always have some stock handy. My elder son loves it too, and is happy to have hummous with toast for breakfast or with crackers for a snack. I recently made it for a dinner with old friends, and we just all curled up around the living room table, eagerly dipping our pita bread chunks into it, while music and conversation both flowed. Bliss!

Ingredients:

1 cup chickpeas, soaked overnight and cooked, or cooked using the quick soak method

1 tsp tahini paste ( or just use plain sesame seeds – 2 tsp)

Juice of 2 limes

4-5 cloves garlic

3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil

½ cup water

Salt to taste

Olive slices and paprika to garnish

Grind together the chickpeas, sesame seeds, garlic and lime juice along with the water in a blender until you have a smooth puree. Tip out and add salt to taste. Top with half the olive oil and stir to mix well. Store in a fridge until 15 minutes before serving.

To serve: serve out into the bowl you intend to use. Scatter the olive slices and add a decorative sprinkle of paprika. Top with the olive oil and serve with toasted pita slices.

This is my entry for MLLA 12, begun by Susan and now continued by Haalo, hosted this month by Apu.

Second Chance

2009-06-01T02:41:00.001-07:00

There are some things one just doesn't get the first time around. Trigonometry (actually, I'm not sure I'd get that even a second time around!), statistics, economics…peanut butter…

Yup, peanut butter. I grew up in India, where you don't get it – either to buy or as a taste – until I was about 12 and then we headed out to first Bangkok for a few years and later, Singapore. I went to the International/ American schools there. I discovered a whole new world of reading – Beverly Cleary with Ramona and Henry, Maud Hart Lovelace with Betsy, Lastuff.ura Ingalls Wilder and so on. I also discovered some interesting things in the cafeteria, which included something many of the American children's books and sitcoms rhapsodized about – peanut butter. At first I wasn't very adventurous about food except for an unfortunate predilection for strawberry flavoured things (synthetic strawberry flavor sucks, I've discovered). Eventually I tried a peanut butter sandwich or two, coaxed on by American school friends but I never understood what exactly about it was a big deal. Eventually I was forced to the conclusion that it was cultural differences, a conclusion that helped me accept a lot of peculiar things that year.

A couple of years later, when we were in Singapore and I was ready to be more adventurous about vegetarian food, at least, we bought a couple packs of Skippy's Peanut butter. I tried the smooth, I tried the chunky. Hmm, not so much, I thought. Then I tried something called Chocolate strips – the peanut butter and chocolate paste were packed in alternating stripes, so when you spread it on a piece of bread or toast, you got a light and dark brown striped thing that finally – finally – tasted good. We came back to India a couple of years later and peanut butter became something one had vaguely tried at some point, kinda like cigarettes, and decided to live without, with no regrets.

Well, recently I was at the neighbourhood hypermarket and came across Ben and Jerry's icecream. I'm not someone who liked fruit-flavoured icecream ( for that I prefer gelato or sorbets) so eschewing the Chunky monkey which is banana flavoured, they only had Chubby Hubby so I picked up a tub. Ben and Jerry's is one of my favourite icecream brands so I hoped for the best after I realized it had peanut butter in it. That night, after all three kids were finally asleep, A and I decided to treat ourselves to a little CH. One spoonful later and I was hooked. This was a lovely mélange of flavours and textures, with the sweet, silken chocolate and vanilla rubbing up against the slightly salty, chunky peanut butter. Awesome, was our verdict.

Then, a little while later, I was flying out of SFO airport and spotted a Ghirardelli's stand so I made a beeline for it and bought a pack of assorted chocolates. Back home, I found a peanut-butter flavoured chocolate. One bite and I was hooked, with the tiny pebbly peanut butter contrasting against silken chocolate all over again. Hmm, peanut butter seems like a good thing, I thought and bought a jar of Skippy's smooth PB. I made myself toast for breakfast a few days later and with a smear of PB and J on it, I realized I had found a new food taste to get hooked on to.

Now the only problem is that Skippy's is quite expensive. There is an Indian brand, Sundrop, which has just launched PB but it's from the house of a tobacco giant, so A and I being conscientious objectors, I can't buy that. Gee, did anyone ever envisage the day that peanut butter would be classified as a 'luxury'?

Sweet Chile of Mine

2009-05-12T23:59:00.001-07:00

I am re-posting this as an entry for No Croutons required, May 2010, hosted by Lisa.

I recently blogged about the terrific Chile I had at the Steelhead Diner in Seattle. So naturally when I got home I wanted to recreate it for my family, but didn't know how to make it taste different from regular Rajma chaawal, apart from the accompaniments. Thankfully I found a great recipe in Nigella Lawson's book Nigella Feasts. I made it a couple of weekends ago when we had some close friends over for dinner. I didn't want to make a typical Indian meal with half a dozen dishes and spices, because it was really too hot to live that weekend. So we had my mom's yoghurt-paneer dip with crudités and hummus with pita bread as appetizers during drinks, followed by Spanish almond-grape chilled soup:

Middle Eastern tabbouleh and Mexican Chile for dinner. The cocoa powder adds a lovely, smoky depth to the flavour of the Chile, so it was a densely flavourful main course in contrast to the light, fresh flavours of the soup and tabbouleh.We had planned to serve a fruit salad with melon and mango for desert but we and our friends were too stuffed by that point.

The Chile was a breeze to make, and I served it with sides of sour cream and salsa.

Ingredients:
Kidney beans – 1 cup, soaked for 8 hours and then cooked or cooked using the Quick-soak method
Cumin powder – 1 tsp
Coriander powder – 1 tsp
Cocoa powder – 1 tbsp
Red chili powder – 2 tsp
2 onions, finely chopped
3-4 garlic pods, crushed
200 ml tomato puree
Salt to taste
Vegetable oil – 1 tbsp
Cheddar cheese, grated – 1 cup

Heat the oil and add in the cumin and coriander powder. When they start to brown, add the onions and garlic and cook until they turn pale brown. Add the rest of the ingredients and bring to a boil. Turn the heat down and simmer for 30-40 minutes until the mixture turns thick.

If you want to assemble it the way the Diner did, top the Chili with the cheddar cheese and bake in a 220 degrees C oven for about 10-15 minutes until the cheese melts and just starts turning brown.

Serve with sour cream ( we don't get it here so I mixed sour yoghurt with cream and whipped the two together until it was thick and tasted like sour cream) and simple salsa – tomatoes and onions finely chopped with green chilies, coriander leaves and lime squeezed in and salt to taste.

The nice thing about this Chile is that you can eat it for days – served on toast or good crusty bread or as is, heated through or cold from the fridge…

This is my entry for My Legume Love Affair 11, begun by Susan, hosted this time by Taste with the eyes.

Red, white and green...

2009-05-07T08:29:00.001-07:00

...Was the theme for the royal foodie joust this month. And with the weather here touching 45 degrees c last week, I couldn't help but remember our wonderful vacation two years ago in Santorini…we landed during a freak spell of cold, driving rain in May, and wondered what kind of beach vacation this would be. But once it cleared up we had an amazing time, marveling at the beautiful white colour of buildings (A's theory was that they were regularly daubed with Greek yogurt) and the blues of church domes, the sky and the water. We also had amazing food – delicious, low calorie, incredibly healthy and flavourful and just perfect for hot weather.

I decided to do more than reminisce and to recreate at least some of the culinary flavours of Greece tonight in my kitchen. So at long last I experimented with the perfect summer salad – watermelon, with feta topped with crushed mint. A splosh of balsamic vinegar and the bite of thinly sliced red onion just accentuated the flavours more and left us feeling fulfilled and cooled down in this hot climate.

Conversely enough, the red of the watermelon looks cool despite the weather, perhaps because of the remembered juiciness, while the cool white of the feta reminded me of an incident in Santorini, where we had seen far-off snow-clad peaks...or so we thought until we drew closer and realised it was a hilltop covered with snow-white houses! And the green of the crushed mint and its fragrance add just that little spring in one's step, that light touch of freshness...

Steelhead Diner

2009-05-04T21:55:00.001-07:00

Last week I was in Seattle on business. Luckily our meeting wound up by 3:00 pm, leaving us lots of free time to walk around and explore the city. Seattle, particularly the downtown area, is pretty compact and easy to get around on foot, unlike many other American cities. We quickly changed into casual clothes, and especially for me and V, flat shoes as opposed to the stilettos we had worn in the morning on our way to the meeting and rued heavily while on the so-called 10 minute walk to the meeting from our hotel, armed with ton-weight of laptop.

It was fun to wander around and we quickly found our bearings as we headed down to the famous Pike's Place Market, famous for its fresh produce. Much of the produce was stuff that dad and I didn't really appreciate, i.e. fresh seafood, though V had fun posing with a giant crab. But the flower section was beautiful with the most stunning riot of colour from newly bloomed tulips. There were lots of interesting artsy craftsy stalls with jewellery, stuffed toys and the like at one end, as well as some fabulous black and white photographs of Seattle, which however were quite expensive.

We wandered across the waterfront all the way to a deck-ey area which opened onto Puget Sound which was beautiful and also got a concerted glimpse of Seattle's skyline. By this time we were pretty hungry but unfortunately most places down by the water seemed to have almost nothing vegetarian on offer, apart from bread and mashed potatoes. Dad and I wanted a proper meal so we split off from the rest of the group and wandered back over near Pike's Place, where we remembered seeing lots of restaurants.

The Steelhead Diner was right opposite the Sur La Table store, and we remembered having passed by so we stopped on the off-chance that they might have something to offer. We asked the hostess and she said they have an awesome vegetarian Chili. By this time, Dad and I were both tired out as well, so we thankfully agreed and were lucky enough to get a table by the windows, which offered a lovely glimpse of the sun setting over Puget Sound.

We ordered two small cups of the Chili, one side of mashed potatoes and asked for a glass of white wine and some beer to cool ourselves down. The Chilean wine was very nice, crisp with a fruit edge, and Dad liked the dark beer they served. The Chili was going to be a first for us and I was curious to see how it would be different from Indian Rajma. The drinks came with some lovely bread served with butter partially softened in an olive oil + fresh coriander sauce, which was incredibly flavourful and which I've got to try out asap at home.

We enjoyed the lively music, the wonderful view and the buzz of action, while savouring the bread.. The restaurant was clearly very popular, and lots of people came in as the evening turned into night. By the time we left, around 9:00 pm, the restaurant was packed. In fact, the next night when V and I went back for dinner, we couldn't find a free table and had to have our meal sitting at the bar, it was so full.

The chili looked awesome. They served it topped with Monterey Jack cheese, sour cream and some pico de gallo. Dad and I dug in cautiously and then wholeheartedly after the first bite. The mixture of flavours just exploded in our mouths – the spicy Chili offset by the bland sour cream, the warmth of the cheese broken by the piquant salsa – it was like a symphony playing on our tastebuds. The cup of chili finished all too quickly. While there was some similarity to Rajma, the overall mix of flavours was quite different and a welcome difference, too.

The mashed potatoes came drowning in butter and while it tasted great, dad and I could only have so much before we were feeling sated.

We ended the meal with a rhubarb sorbet, since neither of us had had rhubarb before. It was a lovely, tart, fresh-tasting sorbet and the colour was just so intensely saturated that it was a treat for the eyes as well.

The service at the diner was fabulous, with the waitress very helpful in guiding us regarding the size of the portions and on what mixture to order, being very attentive as to when we needed something. The bill for a wonderful meal for two came to an affordable $ 46.50 + tip.

Steelhead Diner

1^st Avenue and Pine,

Seattle, WA

Persian Inspiration

2009-05-04T04:37:00.001-07:00

The weather's been hot enough here lately to remind anyone of the Sahara – it was 45 degrees Friday. So hardly surprising that we didn't feel like having the usual suspects of dal and sabzi for dinner over the hot, hot weekend. In fact, the kiddos and I had an inebriated-type long 3 hour nap Saturday afternoon, in celebration of the awful weather. So when it came to figuring out what we wanted to eat for dinner this weekend, I definitely leaned towards lean cuisine. Suddenly I remembered couscous which, while not a husband favourite, does qualify as a light meal. We had had a really lovely meal of what I then thought was cous cous last week in Seattle – on reflection I figured it was probably bulgur wheat, but the thought of couscous inspired me.

I had planned to make hummous over the weekend, so I decided I wanted to give my cous cous a middle-Eastern flavour. But it was too hot to look through cookbooks so I had me a mini-brainstorm. What flavours truly went with Middle-Eastern? Hmmm…mint, for one. Pomegranates would add a Persian touch…and somehow the thought of Persia has always enthralled me…Pistachios would add crunch and further the connection. Lime…

It was really fun improvising this cous cous, and I realized that cous cous is going to get added to my mental list of 'foods I like cooking because I get to be creative'. It turned out really well too, and had that zing of freshness that a hot weekend like this one really needed in a meal. The pomegranates added a lovely burst of tart sweetness to offset the strong mint flavour and the crunch of pistachios was a lovely addition. With this and some litchi icecream for dessert, we had a wonderful summer dinner.

Ingredients:
250 gm couscous

Water (enough to cover the couscous and 1 inch over)
Handful mint leaves

Handful coriander leaves

1-2 Snake gourds, diced
Juice of 1-2 limes (depending on size and juiciness)
Half cup pomegranates
Half cup pistachios, lightly toasted/ dry roasted in a frying pan
1 onion, julienned
Salt to taste

Add the water to the couscous and let it soak in for about 5 minutes. Use a fork to fluff it up once the couscous has absorbed all the water. Meanwhile, finely mince the mint and coriander leaves. Add the herbs, the onion, snake gourds ( like long, crisp cucumber), the pomegranates and the lime juice to the couscous. Make sure the lime is juicy – the ones I used were very tart and flavourful but not juicy and so the couscous was a little drier than I would have liked. Add salt to taste, mix and fluff up with a fork again. If you like a touch of spice, add zatar mix or just a touch of paprika. Chill for about half hour and serve, with pomegranate juice on the side, to add more Persian-ness to the meal.

How's that for this weekend's herb blogging # 182, hosted by Chris.

Srivalli’s Mithai Mela

2009-04-30T01:37:00.001-07:00

Srivalli's lovely blog has its Mithai Mela on and I just scrolled through my archives to find my favourite dessert recipes, since I'm trying not to make any right now for weightloss and too-hot-weather reasons - a crisp slice of really cold watermelon is the perfect dessert for now. It turns out there are a couple of themes running through my archives: Indian being one, and crazy-about-chocolate being the other. It turned out this is a great way for me to collate my favourite dessert recipes in one place, too.

So here are links to the Indian ones:

There's our favourite winter dessert - exotic, rich and completely unexpected... (I realized when I scrolled through my archives that I haven't put down a specific recipe for this, so you'll just have to live through the experience…J)
Then there's the annual feast standard - rich, exotic and favorited by all our friends. I've been known to get threatening phone calls before our annual Id party if I even think about not making this...

Ingredients:
1 cup almonds
1 cup sugar
1/2 cup ghee ( clarified butter)
a little milk ( about 1/2 cup)
5-6 strings of saffron

Soak the badaam so the peel gets loosened and peel them. Puree them with as little of the milk as you can add to still get a very fine puree.
Soak the saffrom strands in 1 tsp hot milk until the orange colour infuses the milk.
Put the sugar into a pan and add 1/4 cup water. Let it cook on a medium flame until it gets a one-string consistency. ( You can test this by dipping your index finger into the syrup and then pressing your finger and thumb together and then pulling them apart. If you get one strand of sugar syrup between your thumb and finger that's it. But be careful - this syrup can burn the skin off your hand!)
Put in the almond paste, turning the heat to low and add the saffron. Cook, stirring frequently but slowly until the mixture starts sticking to the bottom of the pan.
At this juncture, add the ghee (clarified butter) little by little until the mixture takes on a halwa texture and stops sticking to the pan. Keep stirring throughout the process!

Serve hot or cold. This quantity would be enough for about 10 people (it's very rich).

And of course, festival times are synonymous with this dish, which is a classic...

Ingredients:

Fistful of dried, thin vermicelli
1 tablespoon of ghee
1 litre milk
1 and a quarter cups sugar
4-5 saffron strands soaked in hot milk
Handful raisins
Cashews broken up into quarters and fried in ghee until somewhat brown
2-3 cardamom pods, coarsely powdered with a rolling pin or in a mortar and pestle

Break the vermicelli into about 1 cm pieces by hand. Fry it on medium heat in the ghee until it starts turning a light brown and emanates a fragrance. Add the milk, ideally full cream, the sugar and the saffron and let it cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the vermicelli is fully cooked – it'll look translucent. Add the raisins and cardamom and serve it hot or cold garnished with cashews.
I usually like it cold so I refrigerate it and sometimes serve it with vanilla icecream.You can also choose to serve this dish as dessert, garnished with a few pomegranate bits, halved green or puple grapes or almond slivers.

And this one's perfect for every day, any day of the year...
And then there are my two favourite chocolate recipes. I'm always after recipes that have a big inflexion point - i.e. easy on effort but seemingly difficult and having maximum 'theater'.

This is a restaurant favourite - most restaurants love to show off their chops to unsuspecting customers who're impressed with molten chocolate cakes, little knowing how easy they are to make...
Ingredients:
350 grams best quality dark chocolate, softened
150 gms caster sugar
50 gms good butter ( try and get French butter if possible), softened
1 tsp vanilla - or Frangelico/ Godiva, maybe even Tia Maria - or Cointreau...Drambuie...ok, now I'm drooling all over again!
50 gms flour ( Nigella recommends Italian 00 which I don't know what it is – I just used plain maida)
4 eggs
Pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C ( if baking right away).
Grease 6 pudding cups ( I used aluminum muffin cups, not having any other kind to hand, but am immediately inspired to invest in ceramic ramekins, since I think the possibility of making these on a regular basis is quite high) and line the bottoms with baking sheet.
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the eggs and the salt and beat together.
Add the vanilla and the flour and blend together well.
Scrape in the softened chocolate ( try not to be greedy enough to leave lots behind in the bowl so you can lick it off all by yourself!) and blend the batter well together.
Pour into the pudding pans and pop into the oven for 10 minutes.
If not baking these immediately, you can make the batter ahead of time and keep it in the fridge. In that case, keep the timer at 12 minutes for the baking process.
As soon as it's done – the tops will look done, but don't pop in a knife to check, the inside will be wet unlike a conventional cake – take out of the oven and invert onto individual dessert plates or shallow bowls.

And then there's the unexpectedness of a cake with no flour...

Ingredients:
435 grams chestnut puree
125 gms unsalted butter, softened
6 eggs, separated
250 gms best dark ( but sweetened) chocolate (softened)
50 gms caster sugar
20 gms light muscovado sugar
1 tsp vanilla
1 tbsp dark rum
Pinch salt
As always, didn't have all the ingredients, so went along and improvised. Also, have done the best in terms of photography, what with my meagre camera skills and the morning light which is harsh as opposed to lambent - but do, please, do try making this cake. You'll never regret it!
In a deep bowl, mix together the butter and the chestnut puree until well mixed. Then add the vanilla, rum, the egg yolks and the chocolate and blend until well mixed.
In a separate bowl, beat the whites of the eggs with the salt until foamy. Add the caster sugar gradually, and continue beating until the peaks are stiff and glossy. Scatter the muscovado sugar on top and fold in until well mixed.

Working confidently, fold the egg whites into the chocolate-chestnut batter, one third at a time.

Pour the batter into a 22 cm Springform greased and lined tin. Bake at 180 degrees C for 45 minutes ( or thereabouts). The top of the cake will have cracks in it, but who cares - it's meant to look that way. Cool on the rack for 20 minutes. Before serving, dust icing sugar on top and make sure whoever you're sharing this with is already in the room. Otherwise, all you'll have to show for your efforts is a pile of crumbs and a tiny brown smear on your chin!

And oh, ok, for a while back there I'd joined the Daring Bakers and made this rather hideous and decoratively challenged but amazing tasting cake...

Enjoy!

Let 'em eat...

2009-04-30T00:21:00.000-07:00

Well, I finally figured out what poor Marie Antoinette meant when she said, "Let them eat cake!" Doesn't say much about her kitchen sense but it's also not as ironic/ stupid as one would think, it turns out.

Our friends Jean Pierre and Marian invited us over for a party the other week and having finally put the elder two munsters to bed, we headed out with the youngest, since we thought two is enough for any babysitter to cope with at once. It was a lovely party, reminiscent of those we had enjoyed in France, with loads of wine including a very nice white from Luxembourg, and some truly delicious dips and bread. Dinner was amazing - a huge spread with a sizeable vegetarian section; and several loaves of 'cake'.

Cake, it turns out, is the colloquial French for party bread. They're kind of cake-ey in the rich, dense feeling, and look like bread. A cake as we would call it in English, is termed a gateau. And the cakes Marian had come up with were superb - very flavourful, rich and dense, and very inviting to cut-and-come-again. When I asked her for her recipe, she was a little vague about it, like the best cooks are - a little of this, a little of that...

I hunted it up on google, and found that this truly was the kind of recipe I could go for - easily stirred up and very customisable. I'm always a fan of recipes that let me tweak them and add my own touch. So I made one batch for breakfast. Of course, my loaf pans had gotten misplaced in last year's house-shift, so it wound up having to make this in an octagonal cake pan, so it looked more like cake than 'cake', and I had to bake it a lot longer too. But the end result was pretty much as I had hoped for, so I'm definitely going to be making this again. I have no photos since it got devoured too fast, but I promise I'll post one the next time.

Ingredients:
200 gm plain flour
2 tsp baking powder
4 eggs
100 ml milk
100 ml olive oil/ 3 tbsp butter

You can mix in any flavourings you like into this. I added some sliced green olives, a tsp of cumin seeds, 1 tsp red cayenne pepper, 3 tbsp grated cheddar, 2 sliced tomatoes and 1 onion, julienned and browned in the olive oil.

You can also add a dash of cream to replace some of the milk.

Mix well and pour into two greased and papered loaf tins and bake in a preheated oven at 220 degrees C for 20 - 25 minutes - remove from oven when top is brown and fork comes out clean.

This tastes great spread with cream cheese, tzatziki, hummus, roasted bell peppers, butter...anything basically!

Bananas about it

2009-04-16T00:22:00.001-07:00

We love bananas in our family and end up buying large quantities of them. The only catch – you guessed it – they have this awful tendency to get overripe fast. The same thing happened last week and then an old family recipe dashed to the rescue. This is a banana relish, which is delicious eaten with rotis, on bread as a spread, served with pancakes/ idlis/ dosais or even by itself for dessert. And it lends itself easily to being taken up or down a notch with minimal effort. Try it, the kids will love it and it's easy-peasy!

Banana Relish

Ingredients:
2 slightly overripe bananas
Handful grated jaggery or brown sugar
Handful grated fresh coconut ( you can use dessicated coconut too, but in that case cut it into thin slivers)
To kick it up a notch: add a tsp cardamom, a bit of vanilla icecream, some slivered orange peel or if not serving to kids a peg of Malibu coconut liqueur, and a few roasted cashews

Mash the bananas roughly so they are still a little lumpy. Add the jaggery/ sugar and coconut and mix well. Garnish with cashews and serve to delirious applause from picky children!

This is one of my entries for Srivalli's Mithai Mela

Garlicky Baby Spinach Salad

2009-04-14T21:27:00.000-07:00

I love Spinach. My nickname used to be popeye in college, because like that sailor, I can have spinach five days a week, in any one of a myriad dishes. I did a little bit of research on spinach for Weekend Herb Blogging, which was started by Kalyn, and is being hosted by Prof Kitty this week. It turns out Spinach belongs to the amaranth family, and is indigenous to India/ Nepal. It comes highly recommended for inclusion in a healthy diet because of its iron and folic acid content, not to mention tons of vitamins and essential minerals and is especially recommended during pregnancy when women need more folic acid. It also adds to one's fibre intake and is low cal. Health benefits include prevention of osteoporosis, heart disease, colon cancer, arthritis, and other diseases. And it's supposed to help the digestion and improve brain power. What more could one want?

India abounds in spinach recipes, from a simple palak paneer – mashed spinach gravy with roast cottage cheese – to an inclusion in Huli which is one of my favourite lentil dishes, palak pakodas - in which spinach leaves are dipped in a batter made of chickpea flour and deepfried crisp, to raita –steamed, ribboned spinach in a yoghurt sauce. One of my favourite recipes, though, is for Baby Spinach salad. In India, baby spinach is low on availability since Indian dishes call for fully ripe spinach, so usually I'm reduced to buying two large bunches of spinach and pawing through them to find the small leaves to make this salad. However, recently I planted some spinach in a pot in my backyard ( which now qualifies this post for GYO too - yippee!) and last week we could harvest two handfuls of baby spinach – just right for my favourite salad. Serve with crusty bread to mop up the sauce, and watch even kids enjoy this green goody.

Ingredients: (for 4 people)
2 handfuls baby spinach leaves, well washed and dried
½ cup plump garlic cloves with skin on
½ tbsp olive oil
Juice of ½ lemon ( or to taste)
Salt to taste
½ cup roast pine nuts
Pepper if you really want

Chop off the last 1 cm or so of spinach stem and put the leaves in a bowl or a flat dish. Heat the olive oil (not extra virgin, by the way, as that doesn't take well to heating) and pop in the garlic cloves. Take off the heat once the garlic cloves are lightly browned on both sides and pour the oil and garlic over the spinach leaves. Add the lemon juice, salt and pine nuts. If you want, add some freshly ground pepper and serve immediately. Let the family – or guests – enjoy squeezing the garlic skin to burst the sweet pods out and combine with the salad. Pair with a bean soup for a wonderful summer meal!

Potato Salad

2009-04-06T21:44:00.000-07:00

I love potatoes in almost any form ( except raw :)). One of my favourite dishes from childhood has been one for potato raita - a soft, creamy, gentle tasting one that serves as a poignant contrast to the often more robust taste of Indian food. It uses one of my favourite vegetables, tastes great and yet light, and goes well with anything, from rotis to bread - it makes a great sandwich filling - to saaru anna or a plain dal and rice. And as I discovered when I started cooking, it's easy and fast to make.

Ingredients:

4 Boiled, peeled potatoes (I count 1 potato per head)

1 cup homemade plain yogurt

2-3 green chillies (to taste), cut into 1 cm segments

1 tsp oil

1 tsp urad dal

1 tsp mustard seeds ( black)

Handful curry leaves

Handful minced coriander leaves for garnish

Salt to taste

Break the potatoes into irregular pieces by hand, but don't mash them. In a small wok, heat the oil. Pop in the mustard seeds and let them start spluttering. Add the green chillies and the urad dal. Wait till the urad dal starts browning a little and add the curry leaves. Take off the heat and pour over the potatoes. Add the yogurt and salt and mix. Top with the coriander leaves and cool in the refrigerator for half hour or more before serving.

To make this into a yummy sandwich spread, use Greek yogurt or hung yogurt instead of plain yogurt: hang a cup and a half of yogurt in a thin muslin cloth with a weight on top until all the liquid drains out. Eat within 4-5 hours or else it'll start tasting sour.

To experiment with this, you can add a small quantity of minced garlic, or to perk it up some chopped spring onions. A tiny amount of mustard can be added to give it a little kick, too.

This is my entry for this weekend's Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Chriese of Almond Corner.

South Indian

2009-03-31T03:46:00.001-07:00

Most times you ask someone from North India what cuisine they enjoy eating out, and you'll get an instant reply, "South Indian". Of course, it's another matter that for most North Indians, South Indian means idli dosa. I was mighty pained when my husband's uncle, meeting me for the first time after we had gotten married, promptly said in a would-be-south-Indian accent, "tum Idli-vada khaata?" ( You eat idli-vada?). Any kind of stereotyping gets my goat. Not that I don't enjoy idlis and dosas as much as anyone originating south of the Vindhyas, of course.

The trouble with having dosas at a restaurant up north where I live is that the accompaniments are completely tasteless. The chutney is a bland travesty of the authentic chutney, made only of ground coconut with a tempering. The sambar or huli as we call it in Karnataka is a weird, too-sour concoction with tomatoes and a strange assortment of vegetables as diverse as okra, onions and beans floating in a pale soup. We South Indians have very specific vegetable combinations that can be used in huli. The only thing that's up to par is the actual dosa itself.

Some time ago, I had a major craving for dosa with its traditional accompaniments and since mom was out of action with a hurt leg, decided that I would make it from scratch. I went to great efforts to ensure authenticity, from buying the special paper-dosa type frying pan to making the chutney and gunpowder. The only cheat – I bought MTR's instant dosa mix J. On the other hand, MTR is a revered Bangalore trademark for the best of South Indian cuisine so I guess I didn't stray too far.

The whole ritual of eating dosais for breakfast is an experience. The dosas are made one at a time and served hot, fresh off the pan, with dollops of salty and sour flavourful chutney, spicy sambar and gunpowder. It's a lovely mix of flavours and textures - the crisp dosais, the yielding, liquidey chutney, the spicy huli amd the crunchy gunpowder. It's almost a competition to see who can eat more dosas until everyone is stuffed to bursting point. And then the finale - hot South Indian filter coffee, served in stainless steel glasses, tumblers, as we call them, with a thin layer of froth on top. Dosa is usually described by 5-star hotels as a 'crisp lentil pancake, served with coconut relish and a spicy lentil broth'. On second thought, that's a pretty good description, so here I leave you with a smiley picture of my traditional South Indian breakfast…

PS. The recipe for gunpowder

Gunpowder is also known as molaha pudi, which roughly translated means pepper powder. It's a spicy mix of lentils and dried red chillies, guaranteed to blow the roof of your mouth off. Unless, of course, you know the trade secret: to your portion of gunpowder, add about 1/2 - 1 tbsp sesame seed oil or, failing that, home made ghee, and mix it well together until you get a chutney-like texture. The oil or ghee adds a wonderful aroma that's part of the experience

Ingredients:

1 cup chana dal

1 cup urad dal

10-15 dried red chillies

Handful sesame seeds

Roast all the ingredients using 1-2 drops of oil, one by one. When cool, grind to a fine powder and mix, with salt to taste.

This is my entry for MLLA – 9, hosted by Laurie.

Stuffed Mushrooms

2009-03-24T22:01:00.001-07:00

Here's my entry for Weekend Herb Blogging, hosted by Anna this week.

I have a somewhat love-hate relationship with mushrooms. Perhaps because as per the classifications of taste, they are supposed to taste similar to meat, and as a vegetarian, I find their meatiness a bit hard to swallow, literally. However, there are some mushroom-based recipes that I quite like, as long as I don't have them too often. Mushroom curry, a somewhat dry vegetable made in a typical Indian style, with onions, tomatoes and green bell peppers in a cumin-coriander powder sauce is one of them. Another is my mother's famous mushroom soup, which uses liberal quantities of green chillies and very finely minced mushrooms in a broth reminiscent of white sauce, only more watery. Another that I've always enjoyed at restaurants is grilled and stuffed mushrooms. So when we wound up with a basket of large mushrooms at home, I decided to give that a whirl.

I sliced off the stems of the mushrooms and chopped them up very finely. I then mixed this with breadcrumbs, minced coriander leaves, finely chopped green chillies, some cheese ( mozzarella and cheddar mixed), some minced onion and garlic and grilled them, brushed with butter, in a hot oven for about 15 minutes, until they were browning, and served it hot with a dash of lime juice. And voila, a favourite appetizer was born!

Here comes the sun

2009-03-20T05:25:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons I like making omelettes, just like I enjoy making soups and salads, is that within a certain set of rules, you have wide scope to experiment and innovate. I tend to get bored cooking the same recipe over and over again, don't you?

So this weekend I made another of my decadent omelette concoctions, lapped up by my son. These omelettes look lovely-bright yellow, with vibrant greens, as if sunflowers have been playing in your pan!

Ingredients:

2 eggs, well beaten

1/2 cup milk

1 cheese slice ( cheddar or similar)

1/2 onion, finely chopped

7-8 leaves of spinach shredded into long, thin ribbons

1/2 tbsp butter

Beat the eggs with the milk until well mixed. Put the butter into a heated nonstick frying pan and swirl to coat evenly. Pour in the egg mix and sprinkle the onion and spinach shreds evenly over the surface. Cover the pan with a tight-fitting lid and let cook on medium heat for some time. When the omelette appears partially cooked, add the cheese slice on top, cover and cook again until the omelette is done. Serve either folded over or as is, with well-buttered toast or croissants.

How I met Salads

2009-03-17T22:05:00.001-07:00

When I was growing up, eating out wasn't the common or garden variety activity that it is today. It was an event, and happened either at a friend's house, or at an event like a marriage celebration. And salads were never a big part of the experience. First of all, simple Western-style salads weren't usually on menus - those tended to be items like Caesar salad or Waldorf salad. Secondly they'd be really expensive and since most of us were on a strict budget, we'd slide right past that section and go straight to soup and then main course and dessert.

Anyway I was used to South Indian style kosambris and didn't see the big deal. Until we went over to my friend Leon's place. Leon was one of my classmates at business school in France. He's from South Africa and I and my friends had a great time hanging out with him and his wife Ardela at dinner at our home. So a few weeks later when we decided to go sight-seeing in Paris, we were only too happy to let them host us for lunch. Leon's 14 year old son Rezan had made the salad for us.

Actual bite-sized lettuce leaves tangoed with julienned red and yellow capsicum and halved cherry tomatoes and contrasted with the sharp taste of spring onions cut into slices. The salad dressing of extra virgin olive oil, mustard, caster sugar and vinegar was in perfect harmony with the flavours of the vegetables. And the addition of walnuts set the seal on perfection. That salad was an absolute experience for all of us 'desis' who were having something like it for the first time.

And ever since then, western-style salad has been a family favourite. And I can't thank Leon enough!

Apples and Thyme: Shaavige Payasa

2009-03-09T21:51:00.001-07:00

While cooking up this dish for my son's birthday, I traveled back in time to my childhood, and it prompted me to blog for apples and thyme. So many of my memories are linked to this dish, especially those involving any kind of religious occasion. It was de rigueur that on festival days, mom would get up at the crack of dawn, bathe and wash her hair, dress up in a nice silk saree with her hair bundled into a cotton towel to help it dry faster, and start cooking delicious festive food, while dad would be up equally early to prepare for the pooje. Right after his bath, dad would wear a dhoti in Karnataka style, which meant he would wrap it once around himself, pleat the spare cloth in intricate little folds and tuck them in, in front and back, so the cloth formed a sort of pyjama, only one with rippling pleats and the rich mellowness of pale gold silk. He would wrap a similar cloth over his shoulders and sit down to perform the religious ceremony.

Dad has a sonorous voice and a great command over Sanskrit shlokas. For many poojes, however, he would read out the shlokas from one of his kannada books. Periodically he would stumble over one of the words, go back and repeat them, all the while conducting the pooje. First the Gods would be given a ritual bath in a brass thali. Then they would be dressed up for the occasion – first sandalwood paste, then bright red kunkuma on their foreheads. The temple at home would be cleaned up too and decked up with decorations made out of cotton with kunkuma and turmeric rubbed on them at intervals to add colour. A thorana or garland made of mango leaves would be put up. Dad would arrange potted plants on each side of the temple and then decorate with various flowers. Then while reading out shlokas he would instruct my sister and I in what to do – offer turmeric to begin with, then the kunkuma, flowers. My sister and I would compete to offer the biggest or most fragrant flower.

The noise of steel vessels clanking together in the kitchen accompanied dad's chants. The most delicious smells would be emanating from the kitchen – fresh coriander, tempering made from home made pure tuppa (ghee), frying ambodes or papads, the spicy aromas of saaru or huli, cardamom – while equally fragrant scents accompanied the pooje: melting camphor, agarbatti and the jasmines and roses The pressure cooker would whistle deliriously at some critical junction in the prayers and it'd be like a competition between the whistle and dad's chanting.

As I got older, I helped mom out with the small stuff in the kitchen – grating the fresh coconut, helping powder the cardamom, cutting up the cucumber for the kosambri…And of course, inhaling the scent of the payasa as it was cooking. I hated the rice and lentil payasa mom used to make but this was one of the favourites. We'd wait hungrily, torn between concentrating on the pooje and salivating for lunch, since on pooje days one was not supposed to eat before the pooje was over. Though mom and dad were fine with us having breakfast, we often used to skip it on that day so we could save our appetites for the festive food to follow. A silver plate was reserved for the prasada and minute helpings of all the items would be ritually offered to the Gods before we could sit down for our meal.
Small portions of the food were pre-served onto each plate before we sat down. The food was always served onto the plate in a particular order. Salt first, at the top, followed by pickle to the right of it. Then a small spoonful of the payasa, which was one of the prasadas or offerings to God, at the bottom right. The cooked but unsalted lentils came on the left of the payasa. Kosambri would be served next to the pickle, followed by the vegetable curry, palya. The ghee and plain rice would be on the left of the lentils while the flavoured rice of the day would be in the middle.

We had to start the meal by scooping up the payasa, and then we were free to dig in. We'd have the flavoured rice, followed by saaru-anna or huli anna and then the main helping of the payasa followed by curd rice which is an inevitable ending to any South Indian meal. Nothing I've ever eaten has tasted better than the festive meals at my mom's. And after that gargantuan meal, we'd curl up and sleep like babies!

Payasa recipe
Ingredients:
Fistful of dried, thin vermicelli
1 tablespoon of ghee
1 litre milk
1 and a quarter cups sugar
4-5 saffron strands soaked in hot milk
Handful raisins
Cashews broken up into quarters and fried in ghee until somewhat brown
2-3 cardamom pods, coarsely powdered with a rolling pin or in a mortar and pestle
Break the vermicelli into about 1 cm pieces by hand. Fry it on medium heat in the ghee until it starts turning a light brown and emanates a fragrance. Add the milk, ideally full cream, the sugar and the saffron and let it cook on medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the vermicelli is fully cooked – it'll look translucent. Add the raisins and cardamom and serve it hot or cold garnished with cashews. I usually like it cold so I refrigerate it and sometimes serve it with vanilla icecream.
You can also choose to serve this dish as dessert, garnished with a few pomegranate bits, halved green or puple grapes or almond slivers.

Peanuts galore

2009-02-23T00:32:00.000-08:00

I just tried out this Gujarati chutney made from peanuts and it tastes fabulous, so had to share :) It tastes great with toast, bagels, chips, rotis, chillas - just about anything, really.
Ingredients:
3 tbsp peanuts
2 cups full of coriander leaves
3-4 green chillies
1 inch piece of fresh ginger
Juice of 1 lemon
Salt
1/2 tsp sugar
Lightly dry-roast the peanuts without any oil until they are pale brown. Puree them along with the coriander leaves, ginger and chillies and a little water until it turns into a smooth paste. Flavour with the sugar and add salt and lime juice to taste.

Delhi 6 Salad

2009-02-17T02:44:00.001-08:00

I have been tripping on the score of this movie for the past few days. ARR has done a superb job and this is truly one of his stand-out efforts. I liked much of the music in Jaane Tu but felt it wouldn't stand the test of time. Similarly, in Ghajini I only thought the Guzarish song was special. But here he cracks it and lets you know why he is the Maestro! I am in love with this city of mine, Delhi, and the title song of the movie catches a wonderful mood – the hot, nothing-stirs summer afternoons, long lazy scooter rides around India gate watching urchins splash in the fountain pools, the jamun trees swaying in the monsoon breeze and raining fruit down on passersby, Janpath and the myriad stalls there, the winter mornings of hot mugs of chai and the sun on your shoulders…

Another very Dilli thing is the wonderful varieties of chaat one gets here - tongue-tickling, a melange of sweet, sour, spicy and salty and each bite an adventurous explosion of flavours on your tongue. So when I told myself I had to come up with something Dilli 6-ish, I went for a bold burst of flavour - salty, tart, flavoured with spices and zingingly fresh. Here it is:

Ingredients:
Teaspoon cumin seeds
Handful coriander leaves and stalks
3 garlic cloves, peeled
Half cup plain yogurt
Few stalks of mint leaves
Rock salt to taste
Pound the cumin seeds, coriander leaves and stalks, mint, garlic and rock salt together in a mortar until everything forms a smooth paste. Beat into the yogurt with a fork until well-mixed. Pour onto a bowlful of your favourite mix of salad vegetables – sprouts and spring onions, garbanzo beans and tomatoes, lettuce, tomatoes, spring onions and bell peppers…And enjoy to the tunes of the song which can be found here!

PS. My photo of the salad sucks so here are some pics of Delhi…
PPS. Did I mention I used to live in the Red Fort? Yes, in this life!

Yaay, I Won!!!

2009-02-15T20:37:00.001-08:00

Guess what? I won the SippitySup contest with my recipe for McAloo Tikki burgers!!! I am feeling thrilled. Especially because I never imagined my gourmandizing would lead to anything but a larger waistline :)

So I'm looking forward to getting my Jamie Oliver game; and of course to lots more cooking! Thanks, Greg!

My Legume Love Affair - Pateele Wale Chhole

2009-02-10T06:03:00.000-08:00

This is my entry for My Legume Love Affair, hosted by Susan, who began it all...

Delhi is famous for its incredible variety of street food, from chaat - which literally means finger-licking good - to sweets to seasonal specialities. One of my favourites, and yet a recent discovery, is Pateele wale chhole. Pateela means deep vessel, and chhole is a Delhi shorthand for legumes. In this case, the chhole refers to dried white peas, and the pateela refers to brass pots - wide mouthed and wide based, in which the chhole is cooked. This is served with kulcha, one of the few leavened breads of India. Kulche, plural of kulcha, are white, spongy, flat and oblong in shape and apart from a slightly sour tang from the leavening process, practically tasteless. They do have the advantage, however, of being fat free and a perfect accompaniment to anything that's tangy.

My mom in law loves this dish and used to frequently buy it from one of the streetside vendors for lunch. The vendors somehow always get the taste just right, and as they wheel their carts into place, your mouth starts watering from the remembered deliciousness of the dish. I recently had this after a long time at an office lunch party and my tastebuds thrilled to the taste and told me I had to figure out how to make this at home.

Turns out, it wasn't that hard. Of course, it takes a little patience - for one thing you have to soak the peas overnight. But otherwise they're a breeze to make. And easy to customise as to level of heat, since each portion is dished up and garnished individually. And they are delicious with rotis, bread, toast or just by themselves as a healthy snack. Tart and tangy, a little spicy and salty, they are addictively chatpata ( which means tart and tangy, a little spicy and salty!). Somehow they bring out the meaning of the word chaat even while being healthy - the best kind of food!

Ingredients:

1 cup dried white peas, soaked for 8 hours and then boiled/ pressure-cooked in salted water until soft, almost pulpy

1 tbsp cumin powder

1 tbsp coriander seed ( dhania) powder

Salt to taste

1 tsp vegetable oil

1 onion, finely chopped

Handful of coriander leaves, chopped

1 lemon, cut into wedges

2-3 green chillies, finely chopped

Heat the oil in a wok. Once hot, turn the heat down and add the coriander and cumin powder. Stir and continue to cook for 1 minute, till they start turning a darker shade of brown. Drain and add the peas, reserving about a cupful of the water they were cooked in. Add salt and the reserved water and cook for 5 minutes, stirring occasionally, until the spices and salt are well-blended with the peas.

To serve, dish up in a bowl, top with some of the chopped onions, then garnish with the coriander leaves and as much of the chillies as each person cares for, and add a squeeze of lime.

Tip: To make them less gassy, add a tsp of baking soda while boiling the peas. You can also add julienned ginger to the garnisg for the same purpose.

Strawberry Fever

2009-02-09T07:40:00.001-08:00

I had never tasted strawberries, though I had heard about them from my parents when they returned from England. Strawberries held a peculiar fascination for me, since my favorite authors from childhood, all British, from Enid Blyton to Noel Streatfeild, had mentioned them as inevitable accompaniments to summer. I used to wonder what they tasted like, tasting them in my imagination as something out of the world. Perhaps nothing could have lived up to the taste conjured up by my mind.

As it is, in my growing up years, I had to stay away from many food stuffs since I had Bronchitis. Ice creams, heavy milkshakes, grapes, bananas…My parents used to keep trying to make up for this – mom would pressure cook a banana once in a while. My aunt would boil grapes in water to make grape juice. Dad would buy me an icecream cone when we went to India Gate – just the cone, because the icecream would have made me ill. Then, when we moved to Bangkok when I was twelve, it was liberating in many ways. The hot climate and the Bronchitis treatment I got there meant I could finally have icecream. And milk shakes. And fried foods. Even bananas. Strawberries, alas were unavailable there too, but the flavour was ubiquitous, so my sister and I, in our first three months there, had everything we could lay our hands on that had strawberry flavor – milk, icecream, cream biscuits, wafers…

Sadly, though, after the first three months, that syrupy sweetness palled on us and we moved onto other flavours, never to return to strawberry flavor with the same fervor. Somehow the artificial strawberry flavour seems to fous more on the colour than on replicating the intense taste of the strawberry. Even the colour is off-putting - more like Digene or Pepto Bismol than anything else, hardly any relation to the vibrant red-pink of real strawberries. And the taste is just blandly sweet - no fragrance and certainly no tartness to round out the sweetness. Artificial strawberry flavouring is actually revoltingly similar in taste to Digene!

Much later, by the time I was in college in Delhi, I suddenly found little plastic baskets of fresh strawberries being sold at those Diplomat haunts, INA market or Khan market. I had no idea how to pick them so I usually ended up being cheated by the shopkeepers into buying baskets which had red sour fruit on top and green, sour ones at the bottom. I really wasn't sure whether the song and dance about strawberries was just another example of British cuisine. But I was entranced by the way they looked - the lovely heart-shaped fruit, the intense colour, and the whole delicate body being crowned by pretty little green leaves.

Then, on my first visit to Europe, I was in the Eurostar going from London to Paris and found that they were selling punnets of strawberries. I had never seen strawberries like this – they were the size of the peaches we get back here in India. Despite the expense on my limited budget, I had to try them – and finally understood what all the scrumptious mystique was about. Juicy, sweet and yet delightfully and addictively tart, I could have made a meal of them, and nearly did. Ever since, every winter in Delhi, between January and March when the strawberries are out, I pounce on them, hoping to recreate the same flavor that I experienced in England. But maybe that's something that just belongs there, amidst Wimbledon and Boat race night, driven by the terroir?

However, what I can manage is to make strawberries and cream, the cream slightly whipped with sugar to add a little more sweetness to the largely tart flavor of Indian strawberries. Fluffily and palely pink if you refrigerate it for half an hour, it looks like a visual representation of Cloud 9. Add a few ruby-red pomegranate seeds and you're not quite sure whether you're supposed to eat it or just stare at it in delight!

Home Made Burgers

2009-02-09T06:48:00.000-08:00

Like all kids these days, my son loves burgers at McDonalds. In fact, the first logo he ever recognized was the McD one. We were taking him to his paediatrician for a checkup and as we drove past Basant Lok market, a large M in the characteristic font appeared atop one of the buildings. His head swiveled around in interest and he lisped in his 2 year old baby voice, “Mamma, I’m yoving it!” Ever since, one of the joys of his life has been the rare outing to a McDonalds outlet for a McAloo tikki burger, fries and fruit juice. There had come a time when the toy that came with the Happy Meal attracted him more than the meal itself, but since then he’s down to appreciating the food. In fact, that was one of the few meals we could count on him wolfing down without any trouble or need to resort to threats/ bribes.

He’s lately been invited out to quite a few playdates at friend’s homes and we’ve been unable to reciprocate until lately, what with the house renovation, my travel and of course, the baby. So when we finally called some of his friends over, lunch for them had to be a production number. He wanted to impress them by ordering a meal in from McDs, but I figured by the time the meal got here it’d taste like cardboard so I offered him home made McAloo Tikkis instead.

I have to admit, they’re among my favourite things to eat at McDs. Delicious, unlike soy burgers, I totally indulged in them during pregnancy. In fact, I'm surprised that McDonalds has not adopted these as part of their worldwide menu, because there are just so many vegetarians out there, never to mention Indian tourists, who would love a tasty vegetarian option.

I had a challenge on my hands, because the home made version had to taste authentically McDs. I must say, I never envisaged the day that I’d be trying to emulate a mass-produced fast food item in my kitchen, but here I was, flipping burgers like a pro!

The boys loved these and the frozen fries we had freshly fried (that sounds like something out of Dr Seuss’s Oh Say Can You Say, Doesn’t it?) and had a gala time at the playdate. They turned out so well A was asking for seconds, so I’m planning to make them a monthly treat.

Ingredients (for 4 burgers):
Potatoes – 1 per person if the size of a cricket ball, 1.5 if smaller
Onions – 2, finely chopped
Shelled Peas – half cup
Salt to taste
I cup breadcrumbs
4 hamburger buns, cut in half
8 lettuce leaves, washed and dried
7-8 slices of tomato
7-8 slices of onion
Fun Foods Sandwich spread (basically Thousand Island dressing)
Salted butter
Cheese slices if you want
2-3 tbsp vegetable oil
Boil the potatoes in salt water, peel them and mash them until pasty. Boil the peas. Add the peas, the chopped onions and salt to the potatoes and shape into circles that just fit into your palm.Roll them in the breadcrumbs. Flatten them into 1 inch thick disks.
In a frying pan, add the oil. When hot, shallow fry the potato burgers until lightly browned on all sides. Spoon up the oil onto the sides of the burgers while frying so the sides get nice and crisp too.
In another frying pan, add a knob of butter and lightly toast the cut sides of the burger buns until browned and crisp.
Assemble the burgers by applying a layer of the Fun foods spread on the cut side of the bottom half of the burger bun. Top with a lettuce leaf, add tomato slices until the bun is covered, then add the potato burger. Top the potato burger with another lettuce leaf and the onion slices. Slather the cut side of the top half of the burger bun with more Fun Foods spread and cover your burger. Add cheese slices wherever you want. Serve hot, with ketchup on the side.

A Taste of Terroir

2009-01-28T04:05:00.000-08:00

I had blogged about terroir over a year ago, when Anna first came up with this event. Since then, life has intervened in a pretty major way to keep me from finding the time to participate yet again. But Anna's email finally prompted me to stop procrastinating and write in on the theme yet again.
Indian food has a very sound and interesting theory behind it. Most of the prescriptions about what to eat and in which season and how are based on seasonality - what the weather will be like, what the harvest of the season will be like and what the body needs to stay healthy in that weather. This is much more heightened in the north of India, where you actually have 4 distinct seasons in the year as opposed to any other region of India.

Winter in the North brings forth a bounty of delicious vegetables and I go crazy each time I visit the local vegetable market, greedily trying to cram lots of them into my shopping basket, yet bound by the finite number of meals in a day! Green vegetables really come into their own and one can pick out several kinds of greens which are only available in the winter.

One of the major specialities to eat in Punjab in the winter is Makai ki Roti and Sarson ka Saag.
Makai is maize, so this is an unleavened bread made with maize flour and topped with dollops of home made unsalted white butter. With it, you have a mashed vegetable made of mustard leaves blended with onions, ginger, garlic and daikon, again topped with lashings of home made butter. On the side, you have jaggery, the brown sugar made from sugar cane.

These are typical dishes eaten in village homes in this season. By October, you can see mustard plants with bright yellow flowers on their stems as you drive by villages in the North. In villages, the dish is prepared with freshly harvested mustard greens. The Makai is locally grown as well, dehusked and made into flour. The jaggery is made from the sugar cane grown in the villages and is used to sweeten almost everything in the villages, and the taste of the jaggery actually changes with the soil of the area in which the sugar cane is grown.

This meal is particularly designed for the winter, to provide more heat to the body. Makai has a lower sugar content than wheat and thus is slower to be absorbed, keeping one full for longer. At the same time it is easy to digest, a must for cold weather. Mustard leaves are known to be 'heating agents' as per ayurveda even though mustard oil is a coolant. They also make sure the meal is high in fibre which is needed for good digestion in winter. Jaggery too is supposed to have a heating effect on the body. And the dishes are all topped with butter which helps the body to stay well-lubricated in the cold, dry winters of North India.

Of course, quite apart from the health benefits of this meal is the delicious taste. The Sarson ka Saag has a rich, slightly bitter taste, offset by the sweet and salty rotis.

Sarson ka Saag
Ingredients:
1 bunch sarson ( mustard) greens
1/2 bunch spinach leaves
1 daikon
2 onions, finely chopped
2 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 inch piece of ginger, finely chopped
2 green chillies
Salt to taste
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
Wash and clean the greens thoroughly and chop off the bottom two inches of stem. Peel the daikon and chop into 1 inch pieces. Pressure cook for one whistle or boil the greens together with the daikon until soft. In a large wok, heat the oil. Add the onions and cook until translucent. Add the ginger, garlic and green chillies and cook for one minute. Then add the greens and the daikon and cook, stirring occasionally, for 2-3 minutes. Let cool and then puree until you get a fine paste.
Serve topped with white, unsalted butter and a large piece of jaggery, some slices of onion and a green chilli.
(I prefer not to add turmeric as that gives the dish a brownish colour instead of the bright green it otherwise looks.)
Makai Ki Roti
Ingredients:
Maize flour - 2 cups
Water - 1 cup
Pinch of salt
1 tsp vegetable oil
Mix the flour, salt, oil and then slowly add the water while mixing, until the flour becomes easy to knead.
Make the dough into 12 small balls. Roll them into rounds and then flatten them with the palm of the hand. Roll them out into flat disks about 5 inches in diameter and cook on a hot skillet, turning to cook on both sides. Serve hot, topped with butter.

Lentil Dessert for My Legume Love Affair

2009-01-20T04:56:00.000-08:00

My entry for My legume love affair, started by Susan about a year ago.

My mom loves experimenting in the kitchen. One of the delights of her life is to play detective in the kitchen - basically figure out how a particular dish she liked was made and try and do it on her own. I guess that's something I inherited from her.

Recently, she went to a lunch hosted by a friend and had a really interesting lentil dessert and the next day couldn't resist trying to create it on her own. It turned out to be really simple, delicious and healthy!

Ingredients:

Tapioca pearls - 1 handful

1 cup yellow moong dhal

Jaggery - about 2 tablespoons, grated

1.5 cups milk

Handful raisins

7-8 pieces cardamom, peeled and powdered

Handful cashews, roasted in ghee

Cook the moong dhal with approximately twice as much water until very soft and almost pasty. Wash the tapioca pearls several times in water until they turn soft and fluff up.

In a heavy-bottomed pan, add the moong dhal, milk, jaggery, tapioca pearls and raisins and cook until the pearls are translucent, stirring occasionally.

Add the powdered cardamom and stir to mix. Top with cashews and serve. This dessert can be served either cold or hot - when cold it will be somewhat stiff, while when hot it is runny like a thick milkshake.

Ching Chong salad

2009-01-19T07:32:00.000-08:00

This is my entry for The Heart Of The Matter.

I love salads, as any of you who've frequented this blog would know. And in winter in Delhi, it's impossible for anyone to remain untempted by the variety of lovely, fresh vegetables spilling over in the markets. But I also constantly need variety and for some time now have been wondering how to impart a Chinese flavour to a salad without necessarily using Chinese vegetables like Pak Choy and bean sprouts. Then I was watching Kylie Kwong's China tour on Discovery Travel and Living and later, Jamie Oliver, and but naturally, got inspired.

I decided to make the dressing very Chinese in flavour while retaining the salad vegetables I love. It's easy and a refreshing new variation on the same old olive oil vinaigrette. Awesome! The name of the salad comes from popular Indian cinema nods to China, in which 'Chinese' characters say something that sounds vaguely Chinese but isn't.

Ingredients:

Salad vegetables. I used lettuce, torn into bite-sized pieces - and I mean bite-sized. I hate when restaurants ( or people) use whole leaves in salad - they don't absorb the dressing very well and it's very hard to fork them into your mouth! Red radish cut into quarters. Halved cherry tomatoes. The white part of spring onions, diced. Julienned red and yellow bell pepper. Cucumber, peeled and diced. Peas. Green beans, cut into 2 inch batons and parboiled. Broccoli florets, steamed lightly. You can chill the prepared vegetables until just before you want to serve the salad.

For the dressing:

1 tablespoon sesame seeds, dry-roasted

1 tablespoon peanut oil

2 cloves garlic

1 bunch coriander leaves

1 inch piece of ginger, peeled and cut into fine batons

The green part of spring onions, finely chopped

1/2 tablespoon of jaggery, grated

Soy sauce to taste

Juice of 1 lime

1 green chilli, grated ( yes, I mean grated, so the seeds stay on the outside and only the fragrant chilli goes in the salad)

Pound the garlic, coriander and green spring onions together in a mortar. Put the paste into a bowl and add the oil, soy sauce, chilli, jaggery, lime juice and ginger. Keep aside to marinate for about half an hour.

To assemble: Put all the vegetables into a large salad bowl. Pour the dressing on top and then add the sesame seeds. Mix with your hands ( might sound icky but I find the ingredients get mised more evenly by hand than with salad spoons) and serve.

Pea Fog

2009-01-09T06:32:00.000-08:00

This is my entry for No Croutons Required.
I always wondered what the phrase pea-soup fog meant. I've lived in Delhi which gets pretty thick fog in winters but why the pea soup part was a mystery until I actually got doen to making some. We get fabulously fresh peas here in winter - sweet, juicy and flavourful - and it's one of the big pleasures of a winter afternoon to sit in the watery afternoon sunshine and unpeel the pale green jewels, popping more than a few into one's mouth along the way.

I hate the way most cooks end up over-cooking peas so that they become hard little pellets with no taste or savour. I like to cook them so their flavour remains either intact or becomes enhanced. We had pea soup for dinner last night and just had enough so A and I could warn our insides on this cold evening with the rest. It's green, deliciously sweet and spicy, and yes, thick enough to qualify as a fog. try it - it's easy and a guaranteed child pleaser.

Ingredients:
2 kilos of peas ( makes about a kilo and quarter when podded, enough for 6 people)
2 onions, finely chopped
3 cloves of garlic, minced
1.2 litres of veg stock
Teaspoon of sage, rosemary, thyme and marjoram
Salt and crushed pepper to taste
Pinch of sugar
Tablespoon of butter
One tablespoon of olive oil
Half a bunch of spinach leaves ( around 20 of them), shredded finely
In a deep pan, put in the butter and half the olive oil. Wait till the butter melts and put in the chopped onions and garlic. Wait till the onions turn transparent and add the peas into the pan. Add a cup of the water and cook, stirring occasionally, until the peas are really soft and melty. Add the herbs and take off the stove.
After the mixture is cool, blend it in the mixer until it becomes a fine paste. Put the paste back into the pan and add the rest of the water, salt, sugar and pepper and heat it until it comes to a boil.
Meanwhile, heat the other half tbsp of olive oil in a frying pan. Put in the spinach shreds and cook on high until the shreds wilt. Put them into the hot soup and serve, with croutons on the side.

Food it is...

2009-01-05T00:16:00.000-08:00

Having spent most of last year being allergic to food and hungry at the same time ( a condition otherwise known as pregnancy), I was really not that into this blog. But now the baby's out, though you may not be able to tell by looking at me, and I'm back to my passion. We rang in New Year's Eve with an interesting menu:
Potage de Broccoli avec amandes
Salade Jardiniere
Petit Pois a la Francaise
Pommes de terre a la Maya ( from my friend Maya's recipe)
Pasta a la Russe ( Pasta with vodka)
and the grand finale:
Gateau Chocolate a la Nigella ( Molten chocolate babycakes from Nigella Lawson's book)
The Pommes de terre are really easy, and taste fab while looking complicated - a must for appreciation hounds like me. Here's what you do:
Slice up some potatoes really thin. Try and keep them evenly thick. Parboil in salted water and drain, to make the cooking process easier. In a transparent glass dish with 3 inch sides, layer like this: One layer of potato slices, drizzle over with cream beaten with salt and pepper till the potato layer is covered and repeat until all the potatoes are gone. Make sure the top layer is cream. Pop into a 200 degrees C pre-heated oven for about 45 minutes until the potatoes are done. Top with parmesan gratings about 10 minutes before you take the dish out of the oven, if you want. Budget for about 1 large potatoe per person and add 2-3 to the pot so you can have nice leftovers.

The Petit Pois were lovely - fresh peas cooked with scallions and 1 head of lettuce until cooked, juicy but still tender and bright green, in butter, with a little salt, pepper and water and a pinch of sugar added. made them taste even more pea-ey, if you know what I mean.

Since New Year's Eve, here's what I have cooked:
Tomato soup with basil
Salad with chinese dressing ( awesome)
Black carrot halwa.

Recipes shall follow soon...

Greek Salad

2008-11-08T06:18:00.000-08:00

I'm a big lover of salads. South Indian style, with finely cut vegetables, some soaked lentils, coconut, topped with a tadka or Western style, with a vinaigrette dressing. One of my favourite salads is the Greek style salad, with lettuce, cucumber, onions, tomatoes and feta cheese in olive oil and vinegar or lemon. Flavours, the Italian restaurant at Defence Colony in Delhi does one of the best Greek Salads I've ever had, fresh, bursting with flavour and plentiful in the vegetables. Last year, when we holidayed in Greece, I was really looking forward to having lots of Greek salad. However, much to my dismay, it turned out to be a real disappointment. The salads had an assortment of vegetables alright, but the feta cheese was just put on top of the vegetables in a huge, thick slab, rather than being cut into smaller cubes which then mixed with the vegetables and created a unified flavour. The olive oil too tended to be rather heavy.

I love making Greek salad at home through out Delhi winters. You get a great supply of salad vegetables and these days any good grocery store will provide Danish feta cheese in cartons. It makes a good, filling appetiser which is great since I'm always looking for healthy and low-cal recipes. The kids love it too and it's a versatile style of salad since it can accommodate almost any salad veggies you'd like to use.

Last night we had one of my variations on the theme:
Ingredients
1 head of lettuce, washed in icy-cold water, dried and hand-torn into bite-sized pieces
2 green bell peppers, cut into thin strips
2 tomatoes, cubed
2 spring onions, chopped fine
Walnuts, half cup, broken into halves
Raisins, quarter cup
Italian extra virgin olive oil, 1 tablespoon
Juice of half - 1 lemon ( to taste)
Feta cheese, a 4 inch by four inch slab, about hald cm thick, cut into small pieces
Assemble all the vegetables, nuts and raisins together. Mix the oil and lemon juice in a cup, whisking well to ensure it's well-blended and pour over the vegetables. Add the feta cheese and mix everything together. In case the feta is extra-melty, as Danish feta tends to be, you can mix it with the oil and lemon juice and whisk all three together to make a smooth dressing.
You can ring any number of changes on this theme - replace the walnuts with pine nuts, use grapes instead of raisins, walnut oil instead of olive oil, add baby corn, red and yellow bell peppers, fresh green peas, steamed asparagus spears, even steamed green beans...If you find the feta too salty, you can also blend it with a bit of yoghurt.

Decadent Eggs

2008-09-22T01:46:00.001-07:00

I have a peculiar love-hate relationship with eggs. There are times when I positively crave them, and times when the sight or scent of them makes me want to hurl. I think most of all, I object to the smell of eggs and the way the aroma lingers around the house. The way my cook makes it, the aroma hangs around for ages. But when well-cooked, eggs can be delightful and I love cooking them for leisurely weekend breakfasts.

There's slow scrambled eggs, which are buttery and delicious, especially with some snipped chives, and maybe some cheddar grated in. I got the recipe from my friend Lulu's blog, and while it takes more time than the typical way one scrambles eggs, the buttery goodness is well worth the effort. I think I did post the recipe up on this blog as well at some point.

The other thing I love is a really well-made omelette. My brother-in-law in Toronto, who runs award-winning restaurant Amaya, treated us to his omelettes when we visited them 3 years ago, and I've never ever had omelettes that delicious. I copy his method now whenever I make omelettes and they turn out almost as well. Interestingly, the method for cooking these is also slow, unlike the typical French omelette which one is supposed to cook fast over a high flame and serve while it's somewhat runny. You basically take whatever's lying in your refrigerator and a few minutes of magic later - there you are with decadently tasty omelettes. Fluffy, light, not egg-smelling and creative all at once, they make an ordinary saturday breakfast into a festive brunch!
Ingredients:
Eggs ( typically take 2-3 per person; these are not diet omelettes. Or you can take 3 eggs for 2 people and cut the omelette in halves)
Half glass of milk
Dollop of butter
Finely chopped vegetables of your choice - onions, red and yellow bell peppers, green bell peppers, tomatoes, asparagus tips, shredded spinach, spring onions, leeks...whatever you can scrounge for in the fridge as long as they are not watery veggies like tinda/ lauki
Cheese of your choice...the harder ones, ideally - cheddar, gloucester, edam. If using soft cheese like blue, camembert or brie, remember to toss them in just before you turn off the heat.
Meat of your choice ( though I'm not an expert on what meats you can add and when, being vegetarian)
Salt to taste
Freshly ground pepper to taste
Method:
Beat the eggs together with the milk until light and foamy. Meanwhile, put a nonstock frying pan on to heat at the lowest possible heat and add the butter.
Once the butter has melted, add the egg and milk mix and swirl the pan so the mixture covers the entire bottom of the pan.
Once the egg mixture just begins to solidify ( a slow process since you're cooking on low flame), sprinkle the vegetables and the cheese over the surface and cover the pan with a tightly fitting lid.
Let cook, still on low flame for 5-7 minutes and then check to see if done - the liquid egg mix should have turned opaque and almost entirely solid. If it hasn't yet cooked, cover the pan again and let it cook for a few more minutes until done but not brown.
Using a sharp-edged wooden spatula, run the spatula around the edges of the pan and turn one half of the omelette onto the other half.
Slide onto a plate and serve with hot buttered toast. If you want to divide the omelette up, cut the halved omelette in halves in the pan, before sliding them onto a plate.

Hyderabadi Dahi Vadas

2008-08-26T22:11:00.001-07:00

I've never cared for the traditional north-Indian dahi vadas, which are tasteless if not topped with tamarind and mint-chutney and dollops of dahi ( yoghurt/ curd). And the south Indian dahi vadas which I do enjoy occasionally are rather heavy as well as, for me, too cumbersome, what with the soaking of moong dal overnight, grinding and waiting - I like my food to have quick results! So when my sister and I discovered this awesome recipe for dahi vadas from a Hyderabadi friend, we were overjoyed. This is a great dish for a party, never fails to get kudos and yet is easy to make - my kind of food! And it's very different from anyone's notions of dahi vada, so it's a spotlight-grabber - just serve this with an absolutely simple meal of arhar dal and rice, and everyone'll still be talking about the food at your party.

This dish also works as a great cold snack and I usually make plenty for a party so we have enough to dig out the next day. It's apparently a traditional recipe from the Nawab of Hyderabad( Jung)'s family.

Ingredients:
5-6 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
1 liter dahi ( homemade and plain)
1 bunch coriander leaves
2-3 onions, chopped really fine
2 cups gram flour ( besan)
2-3 green chillies
salt and chilli powder to taste
1.5 cups water
Oil for frying

Tempering:
Handful curry leaves
2-3 dried red chillies
3-4 cloves garlic, slivered
Black mustard seeds
2 tsp oil

Grind together the dahi, garlic, green chillies, coriander and salt into a smooth paste and keep aside in the refrigerator.
Mix the besan with the onions, salt, chilli powder and water into a smooth paste the consistency of pancake batter - add the water sparingly while making the paste, which should be slightly runny, not thick.
Heat 1 tbsp oil in a frying pan - spread the oil across the pan - and pour out the besan batter into small, flat pancakes, about 2-3 inches in diameter. Shallow fry on both sides until crisp and then set aside on absorbent paper to cool. Finish all the besan batter this way.

Once the besan pancakes are cool to the touch, lay them out in a shallow but wide dish side by side and layer them until you have used up all the pancakes.
Pour 3/4ths of the dahi-mixture on top of the pancakes and then put the dish away to refrigerate further.

Just before serving, top the dish with the reserved 1/4th of dahi mixture.

Make the tempering and pour it on top of the dish. Serve cold.

Tempering:
Heat the oil in a small wok.
Pour in the black mustard seeds and wait for them to finish spluttering.
Add the garlic slivers and wait until they start turning brown.
Add the curry leaves and red chillies and take off the heat.

As usual, I have no pictures from the last time I made this!

India Food Guide

2008-08-26T22:06:00.000-07:00

Got this great picture of what to track down where in India from a friend:

Chatpata Salad

2008-08-04T05:33:00.000-07:00

Recently a health-conscious colleague started bringing this in as a snack when we were working seriously late on some deadlines, and I loved it. It's healthy but doesn't taste like it, and keeps you coming back for more! What could be better?

Ingredients:
Handful Sprouts - mung beans, garbanzo beans ( kala chana/ chholey)
1 onion, diced
1 tomato, diced
Juice of 1/2 - 1 lime
Coriander leaves, chopped fine
1 tsp chaat masala ( available at Indian stores, for US readers)
Rock salt to taste
Fresh-ground black pepper
Just mix everything together, adjusting the seasoning and serve. If you want to serve it chilled, which makes it taste even better, skip the salt and lime juice until just before serving. You can also add a handful of soaked raw peanuts for extra sweet crunchiness!

The Great Kebab Factory

2008-07-30T00:47:00.000-07:00

This has been one of my favourite 'occasion' restaurants, since the day it opened in Delhi, many years ago. The then-new Radisson opened the restaurant sometime around '97, if I remember correctly, and claimed to have a nephew of the famous Tunde Mian of Lucknow fame as their head chef. The chef had come up with a repertoire of awesome kebabs including the then secretive Galauti Kebab. Rumour has it, an ancestor of Tunde Mian invented this for a nawab who was invited to a feast but had no teeth. The kebab therefore had to have its full meaty savour and flavour but be melt-in-the-mouth. So Tunde Mian's ancestor came up with a way of marinating the meat with raw papaya pulp, among other ingredients, that rendered it absolutely smooth, melting and fiber-free. Don't know if the story's true but the kebab is fabulous!

The first time I visited the restaurant, I wondered what a vegetarian would get and whether it would be worth the price ( Rs. 599 per veg setting), but I had no cause to worry. Their veg selection of kebabs including a veg Galauti made out of Yam is as delectable as their non-veg. How can I say this with good authority? Simply by virtue of the fact that I look forward to going to this restaurant as much as my very non-veggie husband.

The GKF, as we call it for short, later expanded into a franchised concept, with one outlet in Noida and one in Gurgaon with thankfully no let-up in the quality of food or service. The menu is a fixed one - you can order either the veg or non-veg meal, and within about fifteen minutes, with no sense of hurry, you will be stuffed to the gills with an array of fabulous kebabs and matching rotis. The rotis range from an ulta tava roti made with saffron to Bakarkhani and Sheermal, which here are made about the size of the palm, and less sweet than one would typically find at a Muslim wedding. The kebab selection varies, but the veg and non-veg Galautis are the signature dishes and always on the menu. They serve you one of each kebab on the menu at the outset and then you can keep calling for the ones which you preferred.

Last night, we went there with my cousin's family, visiting from the US, and my parents. Sadly, my cousin and her husband had had a rather filling lunch at IHC during the day, which they kept lamenting later on, as the GKF went to work. The meal started with a fruit salad served with a strawberry dressing. Then came the Galautis, served with the saffron rotis. Then a meltingly soft paneer kebab, served with a bun-like roti. The tandoori aloo was relished by my picky niece and nephew. I unfortunately had to eschew one of my favourite kebabs - the tandoori fruit. The spices add a brilliant touch to the sweet, tart pineapple and pear. Then came a shish-kebab which in my opinion did not live up to the high standards of the restaurant - too much ginger in the marinade, methinks. And finally a methi-corn kebab topped with a thin slice of orange as the perfect contrast. The roti and kebab combinations are well-chosen to create a harmonic counterpoint between the two.

As predicted, we were stuffed within about fifteen minutes but couldn't stop eating as the food was so good. The guys looked enviously at my dad who'd had the good sense to come dressed in a pajama kurta and thus able to comfortably let his waist expand, while they squirmed in their firangi trousers. Once the endless parade of kebabs was over, they brought us two kinds of dal, an aloo sabzi and biryani. The fragrance of the biryani was fabulous, and their dal makhani with its tinge of bitterness superb. I sated myself with only dal since I was really full and only had space for dessert :)! But my cousin and her husband did full justice to the entire meal.
The dessert course started with a delicious kulfi for everyone. Usually when you order Kulfi, it's either too frozen or too melty, but this one was at just the right temperature to be refreshingly cold but melt in the mouth without freezing one's teeth off. Dad went overboard on the moong dal ka halwa and had two bowls of it - and he's usually the most restrained of eaters, just at GKF that he goes overboard. Last time we had been here, he had had four bowls (!) of it, but then, that was in winter. My BIL started out trying to play it light by having only the rasmalai but we insisted he have a spoonful of the halwa, which then drove him on to finish off a full cup of it. I had a tiny bit of warm GJ but I prefer the way they make GJs in the South - very full of khoya, and less sweet. A relished the halwa as well, while mom had the chenna payesh - delicious again.

You can imagine what a good time we had, because not only did I forget to take photos of the food but we were supposed to take some family photographs as a memento but were so busy eating that we forgot all about it. The meal was capped off by meltingly soft meetha paans on the way out. The meal amounts to Rs. 1000 per head including taxes, but without drinks. A must-visit when anyone comes to Delhi. My cousin was relishing the memory of the food all over again the next day!

Rainy Weather Delights

2008-06-16T01:32:00.000-07:00

I love the rain, like most Indians do, except the poor souls living in Mumbai who wonder each day whether the floods will be back. Each time I wake up to a grey, cloudy sky, my heart starts dancing and I look forward in eager anticipation to curling up with lots of hot tea and a thrilling new book as well as some otherwise forbidden snacks. The rains just seem tailor-made for high-calorie, hot, spicy and fried snacks.

This Sunday opened on a beautifully rainy day - from early in the morning when we awoke, it was pouring and the sky was so leaden it didn't look like the rain would let up all day. My daughter and I sat out on our rooftop garden and enjoyed the spattering from the splashing rain and watched our plants preen themselves in the lush weather. Perfect weather for family favourite - Maida pakoras.

These pakoras are really simple to make and stay crisp for ages. Eaten fresh and crisp, they are unbeatable, served up with some cardamom tea.

Maida Pakoras
Ingredients:
1 cup plain flour
1/2 - 3/4 cups sour homemade yoghurt ( you can use store bought and non-sour but the taste is much better when the yoghurt is slightly sour)
I handful curry leaves
1 tsp cumin seeds, whole
Salt and red chilli powder to taste
1 cup vegetable oil for frying

Mix all the ingredients together into a flowy paste, adding the yoghurt slowly. Add more/ less yoghurt as needed, to get the consistency right - it should be like pancake batter. Heat the oil in a wok. Put in a drop of batter to see if the oil is hot enough - when it is, the drop of batter will float up quickly, turning brown.
Pour the batter into the oil, one tbsp at a time, and fry till goldern brown. take out of the oil, using a slotted spoon and resting the pakora against the side of the wok until oil stops running down from it.

Keep on absorbent tissue paper so the excess oil gets absorbed, while you fry up the rest of the batter. Serve hot with ketchup or green chutney, though if you ask me, this pakora tastes great by itself. Retire to window seat/ verandah, plate in hand and enjoy while soaking in the sight of the rain...

Bukhara

2008-05-17T00:31:00.000-07:00

Bukhara has by now become famous as the restaurant where the Clintons ate. They even used to have a Clinton platter, with all the stuff that he had relished, on the menu. Bukhara is of course always on the list of world's best restaurants and Delhi's best restaurants, so much so that one feels it has to be a red-letter day to go have a meal there.

We were there last night at an official dinner hosted by a client for us and his visitors from overseas HO. Honestly speaking the seating at Bukhara sucks. There are sofas with low backs and little room to move, and on the opposite side of the table, modahs - little round stools with no back support. It makes for a tiring evening, since meals at Bukhara tend to be long. The setting is nice otherwise, with stone-clad walls and a stone-type roof, copper glasses for water and so on. I didn't much care for the brown earthernware plates they had, though they might be traditional.

We were exhausted and hungry after a long day at work so made short work of the platters of roasted papds and mint-coriander chutney which kept appearing. Most of the papads, we realised after the edge had been taken off our hunger, were over-roasted, though the chutney was fab - zingy with lime and tongue-tinglingly right. Bukhara has a set menu of vegetarian or non-vegetarian dishes for Rs. 3500 per head + taxes (which run pretty high) or you can order a la carte. We opted for a la carte and ordered several starters. For some reason paneer was pretty prominent on the menu. Given this was meant to be frontier food, I don't know whether that was authentic or a bow to Delhi's Punjabi vegetarian cuisine.

The tandoori aloo ( potatoes) and the green, stuffed capsicum were great, though it was a little difficult to eat the capsicum sans cutlery which is verboten in this restaurant. I didn't have any of the paneer though others found it delicious. The non-vegetarian options were relished - the mutton jang ( thigh), the seekh kebabs...The main course was more of the same - along with the famous Dal Bukhara which has now been packaged by ITC Foods as Kitchens of India. The Dal comes floating with a lump of melting butter on top to testify to its richness, and tasted terrific as always. The tandoori phool ( cauliflower) was terrible - overcooked vegetable and so coated with batter that I couldn't figure out where the batter ended and the cauliflower began! Quite tasteless and disappointing. The main course meat dishes were also apparently delicious though not hugely different in taste to those that had gone before. We had the main course with pudina parathas and naans, which were both lovely - fresh and light.

We wound up with kulfi for dessert, mostly, though some people opted for gulab jamuns and the like. I find the selection of dessert very unexciting, after the supposed exoticity of a Frontier cuisine meal. I wish the restaurant could be more innovative. I'm sure there are tons of shirins and halwas which are authentically Frontier, rather than ras malai (!) and kulfi.

The meal for 17 people cost a whopping Rs. 70,000!!! As my colleague Vandy remarked later, that's a lot to pay for kebabs and dal. We hadn't even had much to drink - most people had stuck to colas or at best one glass of wine or beer. My husband recalled that he had once gone there for dinner with an office group of 11 people and the bill had come to a similar amount because they'd had a couple bottles of wine.

In my honest opinion, Bukhara is worth one visit - when someone else is paying - and then the novelty wears off. Frontier at the Ashok serves similar food including an awesome Dal that is stiff competition, and at a lot less. The Great Kebab Factory, for example is a terrific concept restaurant which is also VFM. I wish I had asked for a copy of the bill to frame and put up!
Bukhara,
Maurya Sheraton,
Sardar Patel Marg,
New Delhi

Olive Beach in Delhi

2008-04-02T21:06:00.000-07:00

Yaay - I'm up to the hundredth post on this blog - the last few posts have been trickling in really slowly because I've been too caught up at work, but I have a great hundredth post write-up.

Last night, A took me out to Olive Beach for my birthday. Olive was a restaurant first begun in Bombay and then it opened a branch in Delhi a couple of years later. AD Singh, the promoter has been a restaurant entrepreneur for years. He started with a lovely little place in Colaba, if I remember correctly, called Just Desserts - they used to serve desserts and have live jazz on weekend nights. The restaurant was hugely popular but had to shut down due to some zoning issues or some such. Then he had a Chinese restaurant on a boat anchored off Chowpatty beach, called Suzie Wong - all done up like a boudoir, with fire-engine red drapes and loungey seats.

Olive is relatively his newest baby, though rumour has it he has plans for more restaurants. AD Singh has always been good at coming up with concept restaurants. The other thing he manages to do successfully is to keep generating buzz about his restaurants, so they don't lose their popularity. At Olive, they have flea market sales by local designers, they have spa lunches on Wednesdays where women can combine healthy food with an indulgent therapy and lots of other events. Olive also started the Champagne brunch on Sundays trend at stand alone restaurants in Delhi - before that they had been the purview of select 5-star hotel restaurants or coffee shops.

The old Olive in Delhi was at a beautiful location in Mehrauli, near the Qutab Minar, and used to overlook the ravines of Mehrauli. It was located in a courtyard house and was so discreet that there was no signage outside, just a bright blue gate. The decor was simple - rough-plastered bare white walls, wicker furniture and some mediterranean-style cushions - stripey, aqua, yellow and chartreuse. The courtyard featured a lovely old Banyan tree which would cast dappled shadows over the diners. In summer, huge fans and mist sprays would cool the air in the courtyard, while you always had the option of eating indoors in AC comfort. The courtyard flooring was made up of white, smooth, river stones, with flat grey flagstones marking the path. The restaurant had a wonderful air of being a place out of time - one always lingered over a meal there, enjoying the atmosphere and coming out feeling thoroughly relaxed.

The last time we ate there was when my sister and brother-in-law were in Delhi for a visit. We went over for their champagne brunch one sunday and lazed for a good three or four hours over a gargantuan meal, starting with delicious salads and dips, then soups, eggs made to order, authentic Italian style thin crust pizzas and made-to-order pastas. The part of the restaurant where we were seated had one side made of glass and the other side was open to the courtyard, and the glass wall gave a wonderful view of the ravines and ruins of Mehrauli.It was winter, and the warm sun streamed in through the glass wall. We had such an incredible sense of well-being as we rolled out of there and fell asleep in the car going home...

Shortly after that, the Municipal authorities shut down the restaurant, claiming some code violations - which they have now rolled back a year later, so I don't understand what was the bloody point. Meanwhile, AD Singh had started an Olive catering service for a few months, which was very popular. Some months ago, he re-opened the restaurant in a little-known stand-alone hotel called Diplomat. A and I had been wanting to go there for a while now, so my birthday gave us the perfect excuse.

I'd never been to this hotel before - actually it's a house, set in a huge garden, all white and big-windowed, and looks more like a guest house or one of the old bungalows of Delhi. The restaurant has garden seating as well as an indoor area, and was rocking even on a weeknight - every table was full, with a sizeable sprinkling of locals and expats making up the numbers. The path to the restaurant was set up like a beachside, with white river stones all over and a few wicker and wood loungers under large white umbrellas, and a small little gazebo. The restaurant had lots of plants and flowers grouped together in steel buckets here and there, muted lighting and a tiny little pool at one corner. Large pedestal fans had been set up and were more than effective - it was such a pleasant night that one actually felt chilled by the breeze from the fans. The Olive decor had been repeated here - mostly white, with comfortable wicker chairs and a scattering of mediterranean coloured cushions.

We had a cheese platter as the appetizer, followed by a roast-vegetable pizza and tortelloni with ricotta. The cheese platter was fabulous, though only the bocconcini and the chunk of parmesan were Italian. They had an Emmental and another hard, dry cheese that I couldn't recognise. They also had a blue cheese on the platter that was new to me. The bocconcini was stuffed with a spicy green chilli which made a fiery contrast to the bland cheese. The cheese platter came with onion jam, chestnut honey, thin slivers of pear and some apricots, walnuts and prunes. Didn't much care for the dry fruit but the honey, pears and the onion jam were great accompaniments to the cheese.

The pizza was a new take - thincrust, Italian style, it had roast vegetables, including tomatoes, aubergines and broccoli, and was topped with an arugula salad complete with vinaigrette! When I ordered it, I thought the salad was a side dish - I hadn't conceived of it being an actual topping. It was fantastic - made the pizza taste so much lighter just because of the bite of the arugula and the tart vinaigrette. I'm going to have to think about this the next time I make pizzas at home.

The tortelloni came stuffed with ricotta, topped with diced tomatoes, with a parmesan-cream sauce. Sounded great but unfortunately was too tart for my liking - and I'm someone who loves sour flavours.

Oh, well, that left more space for dessert. We shared a chocolate fondant - essentially a molten chocolate cake, served with a fresh raspberry mousse. It was delicious, even though I thought the chocolate used in the recipe should have been a dark chocolate, ideally, and not a milk chocolate as appeared to be the case. There is a rich decadence to dark chocolate that milk chocolate just cannot come close to. But again, the pairing of the fresh, tart flavours of the raspberry with the warm heaviness of the molten chocolate cake was inspired.

I still miss the open feeling one got at the old Olive - here the other buildings loomed a bit too close and the garden was quite small, so one felt a little more crowded. But all in all, it was a terrific meal , with great service. The meal for two, with one drink, came to Rs. 3500, including the service. ( Though I must admit the taxes were over Rs. 600!)Definitely worth a re-visit!

Olive Beach,
Sardar Patel Marg,
New Delhi

I did take pics with my camera phone but my phone and computer aren;t talking to each other so will have to upload them later!

A Series of Unfortunate Events...

2008-03-29T21:13:00.000-07:00

I've baked a few cakes in my lifetime, mostly chocolate ones - Black as midnight, the Chocolate Chestnut bomb and Molten Chocolate Babycakes. But I freely admit I'm not a dab hand at decorating them. I did get enthused a few years ago and buy myself a set of decorating tools but many of those were soon pilfered by my then two-year-old and then I figured I'd focus on content rather than presentation. So it was a huge challenge for me to participate in the Daring Bakers challenge for March of baking the perfect party cake and decorating it with butter cream.
Of course, I had a few other challenges during the process. For one, our electricity supply has been erratic, to put it mildly, so I'm never sure when it's ok to pop in a cake. As it turned out, over the long weekend, we had power long enough to bake a few potatoes, but about 10 minutes after I'd huffed and puffed and popped the party cake in, the power went off for over half an hour. I was in a real quandary because I didn't know whether I should re-mix the cake batter to get it airy again. Eventually I didn't, so I'm not sure if the cake turned out as light as it should have.

Then I needed to cover the layers with raspberry jam but I butter-fingerily dropped the jar and smashed it, so I had to use blueberry preserves, which were much thicker and full of whole blueberries - delicious but not very spreadable. I also forgot whether I needed egg whites or yolks for the icing and used up the whites by mistake, so I had to separate another bunch of eggs - we had a loof scrambled eggs last weekend as a result. Being really untalented at decorating cakes, I overdid the blue food colouring so I got a deep blue instead of the pale colour I had wanted.

The only mishap that I was anticipating but which didn't happen was that the butter cream icing didn't curdle. It came together beautifully, white and fluffy and was great fun to use.

I used some blue-coloured coconut flakes for the sides of the cake and a handful of hundreds and thousands came in handy to cover the top of the cake where the icing was slathered on roughly.

I must admit that the cake was a huge hit. Mom loved it and didn't cotton on that the icing had raw egg whites in it - in fact, she commented that there was no smell of egg. A's office pals and my colleagues were impressed that I'd actually decorated it at home. And I find myself already contemplating doing this over for my daughter's birthday, if only I can get someone to come along and decorate it for me!

Ajji's Aloogadde Palya

2008-03-19T20:50:00.000-07:00

I love potatoes, they're my never-fail veg for almost any mood. There are a million ways in which I use them, including garlicky tikkis, comfort food veggie, on pizzas etc, but the way my grandmom makes them is something I can't aspire to, due to reasons of lack of time and patience, but oh...aren't they wonderful?

Grandma's potato veg is something all her grandchildren and greatgrandchildren really relish and it's a standing request from all of us any time we visit her. Only a grandma would have the love and strength to make this, IMHO, so be warned before you try it!

Ingredients:

Potatoes ( count one per person and 2 for the pot) - peeled and cubed really, really, really small ( about 2 mm per side, and I'm not kidding)

1 tsp black mustard seeds

1 tsp urad dal

Pinch turmeric

Handful curry leaves ( torn into smaller pieces)

1-2 tsp chilli powder ( to taste)

Salt to taste

1 tbsp vegetable oil

Heat the oil in a wok. Add the mustard seeds and wait for them to stop spluttering. Add the turmeric, curry leaves and urad dal. Wait until the dal starts browning, turn the heat way down low and add the potatoes. Cook on a very low flame, stirring periodically ( pretty much till your arms fall off), until the potatoes are cooked through and crisp.

Turn off the heat and add the salt and chilli powder and stir to mix.

This veg tastes great with almost anything - curd rice, rasam and rice, chapattis, buttered toast, with plain yoghurt as a raita...it is so delicious that I'm contemplating serving it as one of the snacks for the next party we host, though for that I might have to kidnap my ajji and keep her here with me:)

This was for weekend herb blogging for this week.

Arusuvai Chain - Saffron

2008-03-13T01:31:00.000-07:00

I have really not cooking much lately, what with a hectic work schedule and general change of season tiredness. But...ages ago, my fellow-blogger Shella introduced me to the Friendship chain and sent me some saffron essence. I don't use saffron much, except in badam kheer, badam halwa or to put on my kids' noses when they have colds ( it works a treat on young kids), and I didn't want to repeat the badam recipes so after some soul-searching, decided to whip up something off the top of my head.

When I was a kid, my dad used to make caramel toast for me occasionally, as a treat. I still love that, by the way, but I wondered how it would be if I added a twist to the Caramel toast and layed it with khoya flavoured with saffron (khoya is thickened milk, thickened until it is the consistency of dough, and can be moulded). Once the thought got into my head, mostly prompted by the small quantity of khoya left over from my black carrot halwa, I had to give it a whirl.

It tasted rather good, actually, with the milky bland contrast of the khoya against the sugar injection of caramel toast. The saffron added a good richness to the mix, so I am contemplating making this the next time we entertain. It'll certainly be something I can whip up in a hurry if we have unexpected guests.

Caramel toast:
A few slices bread( white or brown, either will do)
Some dollops of ghee
1 tbsp sugar for each slice of bread

Heat some of the ghee in a frying pan. When it has melted, sprinkle half a tbsp of sugar all over, roughly about the size and shape of your slice of bread.
Once the sugar turns pale brown, pop in the bread slice and cook on a low flame, pressing down, until the caramel turns a bit darker.
Remove the bread slice, put some more ghee and sugar and put the slice of bread, uncoated side down, onto the pan and let that too get browned.

When all your slices are done ( and do remember not to stack them while hot - they'll all stick together), mix the saffron essence into the khoya and spread, like butter but only more thickly ( as thick as a slice of cheese) on top of half the bread slices. I had about 100 gms of khoya which was enough for 4 bread slices. Sandwich with the remaining caramel toasts and serve cut up into swuares, like a burfi.

Half Moons

2008-02-28T01:02:00.000-08:00

Half-moon shaped treats are common across cultures, from the middle east, where they are stuffed with spiced meat or dates and nuts to Italy where they are stuffed with cheese and spinach to India, where we make kadubu for Ganesh chathurthi. I've always loved the fresh coconut kadubus, with their moist, rich filling of fresh grated coconut, jaggery and cardamom powder playing off the crunchy flour case. But I had never had savoury kadubus until a couple of years ago when my grandmom was visiting.

For the first time ever, we were together on her birthday so I wanted to have a party for her. But the catch was that she doesn't eat onions and garlic whereas I'm hardpressed to find savoury recipes without these ingredients. Luckily it occurred to me to dig out my trusty Gujaratai cookbook by Tarla Dalal and I found a recipe for ghughras - little kadubus stuffed with spiced peas. Sounded nice to me so I made them and they turned out incredibly well. Tried'em again last week as practice for Chubbocks' upcoming birthday party next week. Easy Peasy, and so pretty!
Ghughras
Filling ingredients
2 cups peas
2 tsp ginger-green chilli paste
Salt to taste
Pinch asafoetida
Handful freshly grated coconut
Juice of 1 lemon
1 tsp sugar
1 tsp jeera ( cumin seeds)
Handful freshly chopped coriander leaves
Coarsely grind the peas with the ginger-green chilli paste until they are still grainy but mashed up.
Heat a bit of oil in a wok and add the jeera. When it turns toasty, add the asafoetida. Add the peas and a little water ( 1/2 cup) and cook, first covering up the wok and later uncovering it and letting the water boil away until the peas are well-cooked.
Add the rest of the ingredients and mix well.
Ghughra Flour Case
Ingredients:
2 cups flour
2 tbsp ghee
Water as needed
Mix the three and knead into a stiff dough, like for puris.
Break into 14 small balls and roll each one out into a thin circle about 5 cm in diameter. Heap the ghughra filling onto one half of the circle, taking care not to go too near the edge. Fold the other half of the circle over and pinch the ends of the circle together ( so it looks like a half moon) so that there is no opening from where oil can get in ( this is important, else the ghughras will taste dry).
Deep fry each ghughra on a medium heat until pale brown. Serve hot with a coriander or tomato chutney.
I also like the filling by itself, so we often make it as an accompaniment to rotis, without mashing the peas up.

Pizza Parlour

2008-02-21T19:47:00.000-08:00

Some years ago, when A and I were on holiday in Italy, we discovered what real pizza is like, and we fell hard for it. So much so that now I can't stand Pan pizzas of the kind churned out by Pizza Hut or Dominos. I also don't like the rather naan-like pizza bases that are available in the market. A couple of years ago, while on holiday in the US, my sister had taken us to a little restaurant called Pizza Antica which served really interesting pizzas - all on a thin Italian base. So last week, since I had been mulling over the thought of experimenting with pizzas at home, I remembered that experience and decided to really go wild with the toppings.

The base too, I made from scratch - and let me say at the outset that I'm really bad at working with yeast - those things never turn out quite right. But I was determined to try and to add a twist to the base too. So I soaked some dried yeast in hot water, and mixed it into the plain flour along with a pinch of salt and sugar, as well as some Italian herbs. For the toppings, we had a choice of four variants:
a. Potatoes, English Gloucester and feta cheese
b. Roast aubergines and tomatoes with mozzarella and parmesan
c. Pan-fried spinach and roast garlic with mozzarella; and
d. Pears with Danish Blue cheese and walnuts

I sliced the potatoes really thin and parboiled them for the first pizza. For the second, I pre-roasted the thinly sliced aubergines and tomatoes; for the third, the shredded spinach was shallow-fried in olive oil until a little crisp, while a bulb of garlic was roasted in the oven with a glug of olive oil poured on top, and for the last one, I just put everything together and popped it into the oven.

All the pizzas were delicious, though I do need to think of something to add a little more excitement to the potato-topped one. The roasted aubergines and plum tomatoes were caramelised by their time in the oven, and the little bits of Feta addded the right contrast of saltiness to create an absolutely heavenly mouthful. The spinach-garlic one also had a lovely intermingling of textures, and the sweet roasted garlic added just the right touch. The last one was the favourite, though. I had been thinking for a while that slightly caramelised pears would be a wonderful contrast to Blue cheese and that the two flavours would go really well together. And I always like walnuts with either camembert or blue cheese, so I popped them on top as a last minute inspiration. This pizza had a really hedonistic flavour and we loved the juxtaposition of the sweet pears with the intenseness of the blue cheese and the crunch of crisp walnuts.

This was a really fun kitchen experiment and I'm getting all excited about doing it again, either just for the family or when we have a small group of friends over. I'm sending this entry over to weekend herb blogging, hosted this week by Lia. It strikes me that this is a great way to get kids to eat up their veggies too - because pizza always entices kids, no matter what's on top! I will say, though, that next time, I'll let the pear and walnut pizza get half-done before adding on the blue cheese. Of course, next time around I also have to make sure we're not so hungry we don't wait for the camera and just click with the cellphone. Also - am seriously crap at geometry so my pizzas aren't any recognizeable shape...
(PS Pictures will be up shortly)

Couscous

2008-02-13T23:07:00.001-08:00

I have liked whatever I have tasted of middle-eastern food so far, from the ubiquitous Lebanese which used to come in handy whenever I didn't feel like cooking back when we lived in France, to Moroccan Tagines to Turkish Imam Bayildis and all the bean dishes which we gorged on last summer in Istanbul. So I recently bought a couple of cookbooks - one on Middle-eastern food and one on African recipes - which I was really keen on trying out. It's been a pretty hectic time for us for many reasons, and we've been eating out a lot, including really heavy Indian food, so I thought Middle-eastern food would have just the right touch of flavour and lightness with the added benefits of both familiarity and exoticity.

Couscous sounded like the right thing to serve, along with a simple warm bean salad. I had encountered couscous years ago at a French friend's home. She had gone to great trouble to make a bowl of vegetarian couscous for me as I was the only vegetarian at the party. Unfortunately her recipe had dates, raisins and was overwhelmingly sweet which is something I don't care for in a main course. My recipe book had all kinds of meat-based couscous recipes and the only vegetarian one needed roasting vegetables for 2 hours, which I just wasn't feeling up to. So I figured I'd invent a recipe for myself and went along. Both the salad and the couscous were delicious and loved by even my son who is a picky eater, and the meal was exactly what I was looking for - light, nutritious and infused with a sense of harmony and well-being. What a way to start a week!

This post is going over to Skinny Gourmet for Weekend Herb Blogging.

Warm Bean Salad

Ingredients:

1 pound Green beans, peeled and cooked ( I boiled them in salted water until done)

100 gms Feta Cheese, cubed

1 red onion, cubed

2 tbsp olive oil

10-15 black or green olives

Juice of 1 lime

Heat the olive oil. Add the onion and tomato and saute for a minute, then add the green beans and the Feta cheese. Stir to mix for a couple of minutes and turn off the heat. Add the olives and the lime juice, mix and serve. Feel free to top a handful of walnuts or pinenuts.

Couscous

Gravy Ingredients:

1/2 green, yellow and red bell pepper cut into strips

1 onion, julienned

1 zucchini, cubed

2-3 cloves garlic

2 tbsp olive oil

300 ml water

1 tsp cumin

1-2 tsp paprika

Salt to taste

2 tomatoes, cubed

Heat the olive oil. Add the cumin seeds and wait for them to turn toasty. Add the garlic and onions and saute until the onion turns translucent. Add the tomatoes and cook until they turn soft. Add the zucchini and the 300 ml water, salt and paprika. Cook on a low heat, covered, for five minutes, then take the cover off and let simmer until the zucchini starts turning translucent. Add the bell peppers and keep simmering until all the vegetables are cooked.

Meanwhile, put a tbsp of olive oil into a saucepan and heat. Turn the heat off and add 250 gms of couscous and stir to mix. Add 1/4 cup of warm water and mix with a fork or your fingers until the couscous grains start plumping up. Leave aside until the gravy is done. Then add a few shavings of butter into the warm couscous and work with your fingers until the butter is melted and the couscous grains plump and shiny.

Assemble by serving a mound of couscous on each plate, making a shallow crater in the middle and pouring the gravy into the crater. Serve hot.

RCI - Gujarati Food

2008-02-11T00:48:00.000-08:00

Many years ago, we decided to go on a ten-day tour of Gujarat, since my sister had an interview at IIM A and my dad's organisation had several regional offices that he needed to visit. Those were the old days, before budget airlines, so we all travelled by train, an overnight journey to Ahmedabad. Of course, the trip started on a funny note as, after yelling at all of us to make sure we had packed everything we needed, Mom forgot her entire suitcase at home, As soon as we landed in Ahmedabad, we had to call on a friendly colleague of dad's who hauled us off to a narby market and Mom bought several sarees, plus petticoats, and even found a tailor who delivered several well-stitched blouses overnight.

Our only worry before going was the food. Not the vegetarian aspect of it, since we are all veg, but the fact that rumour had it all Gujarati food was sweet tasting. We had had a few Gujju snacks - dhokla which we all loved, Shrikhand which was a summer staple at our place, muthias, theplas and khakras - but having every meal with a selection of sweetish dishes seemed like too much of a good thing. We needn't have worried. The kind lady who helped mom shop also took us to a restaurant for breakfast. One warm helping of Phaaphdas with chutney and we were hooked. We had an amazing journey through Gujarat - Ahmedabad, Lothal, Gandhinagar, Junagadh, Somnath, Dwarka, Baroda etc, and we felt like mini-kings or at least like Raj relics as, since Dad was an extremely high-ranking central government officer, at each station the guard used to come up to him and ask if it was okay for the train to start. Cool, eh?

Many years later, I bought a copy of Tarla Dalal's Gujarati cookbook and gujju dishes like this have been pretty much part of the Sunday repertoire whenever I get cooking. For RCI - Gujarat, I wanted to make some new stuff, though. I had planned on an entire meal including dessert but we ran short of time after grocery shopping so dessert was the yummy Basundi - a thickened milk dessert flavoured with saffron - packaged by Amul which I bought on my last visit to Ahmedabad.

The meal I served, though no match for Pakwan, was:

Trevtia dal and

Gajar-shimla-mirch sambhaar with

Methi Theplas

Simple, flavourful and delicious and, best of all, light!

Trevtia Dal

Ingredients:

1/2 cup green split moong dal

1/2 cup arhar dal

1/2 cup chana dal

1 tomato, chopped fine

1 onion, chopped fine

2 dried red chillies

Juice of 1 lime

1/2 tsp asafoetida

Turmeric

3-4 cloves

Red chilli powder

2 green chillies

1 tsp cumin seeds

1 tbsp vegetable oil

salt to taste

Pressure cook the three dals together for 3 whistles. Meanwhile, heat the oil in a wok. add the cumin seeds. When they darken, add the red chillies, asafoetida and turmeric. Add the onions and saute until translucent. Add the tomato and cook until soft. Add the green chillies, red chilli powder, cloves and the cooked dals. add 2 cups of water and bring to a boil. Add the lime juice and salt and simmer for 10 minutes. I garnished with fresh coriander leaves which always add a refreshing fragrance to any savoury dish.

Gajar-Shimla Mirch Sambhaar

Sambhaar is a gujarati masala mix and not the south Indian dish one serves with dosa, I found out.

It is made by mixing 1 cup yellow mustard seeds, 1/4 th cup fenugreek seeds, 1.25 cups red chilli powder, 2 cups salt, 2 tbsp asafoetida and 1 cup oil. You just heat the oil, let it cool and throw over the mixture of the rest of the ingredients. It tastes best a few days after it is made.

For the Gajar Shimla mirch sabzi, you just cube two carrots and green capsicums, saute them in a mustard-seeds tempering with a pinch of asafoetida until cooked but crunchy and pour 3 tbsps of the sambhaar masala over it. It tastes better if left for about an hour to take in the flavour of the masala.

Theplas (for 12-14)

Ingredients:

2 cups whole wheat flour
1 cup curd/ yoghurt
1/2 teaspoon turmeric
1 1/2 teaspoons chilli powder
1 tablespoon coriander powder
2 tablespoons oil
salt to taste

Mix into a soft, pliable dough, using water only if required. Add sauteed methi leaves if you like ( we love them) while mixing the dough. Roll them out to 5" diameter rounds and cook on a hot tava until both sides have brown spots, using a few drops of oil along the way. Serve hot.

Indian Food

2008-02-07T20:16:00.000-08:00

Haven't had much time or mindspace for cooking lately, with Puddi's illness and hospitalisation. But she's fine now, back to being the family dog ( i.e. begging for scraps off everyone's plate, no matter what they're eating!) and her usual zany self. I celebrated her return home by brewing up a pea soup with spinach greens sauteed with garlic, but haven't done much else.

But I came across this interesting book which I started reading while nursing Puddi in hospital. It's by an Indian food writer settled in the US ( Chitrita Banerji) who specialises in Bengali food but was on a self-imposed quest to find out more about the origins of the different styles of cooking in India. Her chapter on Bengali food, especially that served at weddings made me slurp deliriously, even though I'm vegetarian. I of course immediately turned to the chapter on Karnataka food which I admit was a bit of a let-down because it hardly mentioned the varied types of cuisine and was not informed or knowledgeable enough, in my opinion.

Sadly, the book mysteriously vanished after I had completed these two chapters and I could neither find it in the hospital room or at home so I assume it's vapourised into that great library in the sky. I'll have to buy myself a new copy because I found the little that I dipped into quite intriguing...

JFI - Onions

2008-01-30T20:29:00.000-08:00

Onions are amongst my all-time favourite veggies. I can't imagine a meal without onions in some form, and the ten days of Dussehra when mom used to cook sans onions and garlic were a form of purgatory. I bung them into almost anything except dessert and who knows, someday I might be tempted to create some form of dessert using onions.

What is interesting is the variants that abound, from chives to spring onions to leeks to half a dozen variants of onions that I know of, including plain white ones which I use to make this soup or red onions for the famous French Onion Soup or Hyderabadi Dahi Vadas which stars another favourite root veg - garlic. Each variant has a special use - from spring onions which we use for Jhunka to roast or baked leeks which taste fabulous with a cheesy sauce and a bread-crumb topping to sambar onions used for (you guessed it) sambar which taste fabulous with idlis. There are also some yummy onion chutneys around, notably the one served by Sagar Ratna, the South Indian fast-food chain in Delhi.

So when faced with the JFI theme for February, I was in a quandary as to what I could make that would be special enough, and then I remembered our winter special of Rajasthani Parathas. These are delicious parathas with onions as one of the key ingredients. You can make the stuffing and store it ahead of time and just pull it out whenever the mood strikes. We usually have these parathas with plain old dahi or Tzatziki, and that's more than enough to complement them.

Rajasthani Parathas
Ingredients:
filling:
1-2 cups besan (chickpea flour)
3-4 onions, chopped really fine
2 tsp cumin seeds
2 tsp coriander powder
2-3 tsp chilli powder ( to taste)
Salt to taste
1 tbsp veg oil
Parathas:
Wheat flour
1 tbsp oil
Pinch of salt
Water for kneading

Oil for cooking the parathas

Heat 1 tbsp oil in a wok. Add the cumin and coriander. When toasted, add in the onions and slowly fry them on mid-high heat until they are crisp. Keep aside. in the same wok, put in the besan and roast until it gives off that nice, warm smell. Mix the besan with the onions, chilli powder and salt and store it in a dry jar until you are making the parathas.

Knead the Paratha dough - it should be smooth and not stick to the fingers. Roll out a roughly 6-7 inch diameter paratha and put a heaped tbsp or two of the filling. Fold the paratha over the filling and roll it out again. The parathas should be about 2 mm thick.

Cook on a tawa/ cast iron griddle with a bit of oil until the parathas are a warm beige colour with brown spots on both sides. They will be crisp, like papad. Enjoy hot with dahi and retire for a well-earned nap!

(Photos will follow)

Beans/ legumes

2008-01-27T20:39:00.001-08:00

I love the bean family. I love the idea of cooking or experimenting with beans and am always looking for new ways to cook and enjoy them, so I was inspired to do some creative cooking over the weekend by the theme A Legume Love Affair. It has been really, really cold here for the past week ( about 2 degrees C at minimum, and probably lower with the wind-chill), so I wanted to brew up a hearty broth of a soup with beans.

I flipped through a couple of recipe books but nothing there appealed to me so I decided to whip up my own concoction. I wanted something with the essence of Thai flavour to it, but not necessarily a traditional Thai recipe, and wanted to use beans. We had bought these intriguing white beans from a trip last year to Himachal Pradesh, so I soaked a cupful overnight and then pressure-cooked them until soft the next morning.

I luckily had lemon-grass on hand, and have several flourishing basil plants in my roof garden as well as a lime tree so the basil and kaffir-lime flavours were taken care of. I didn't have galangal do decided to go ginger-free for the soup. I always like having lots of veggies in the soup, so I used whatever came to hand - a handful of podded peas, some broccoli, a carrot, one green pepper...The soup turned out brilliantly. It's one that I will definitely be repeating or ringing changes on. It was flavourful and aromatic, brothy yet light and a complete win with both A and my mom and the kids.

Thai-inspired Bean Soup
Ingredients:
1 cup White beans, soaked overnight and pressure cooked until soft
2 red onions, chopped
3-4 pods garlic, peeled and chopped
Handful fresh basil leaves
4-5 kaffir lime leaves
1 stalk lemon grass, chopped into 1 inch pieces
Handful fresh grated coconut
2 cups mixed vegetables, diced and boiled
1 tbsp oil
Salt to taste
1-2 tsp chilli powder
1 tbsp sugar
Handful coriander leaves, chopped finely
Lime juice to taste
1/2 tbsp vegetable oil ( peanut)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1/2 liter veg stock/ water

Heat the oil and put in the cumin seeds. When they get toasty, add the basil and lemon grass. Add the onions and garlic and cook, stirring occasionally until brown. Puree the beans and the onion-garlic-lemon grass mixture together with the coconut.
In a saucepan, pour in the bean puree, the mixed vegetables and half a litre of water/ veg stock. add the salt, chilli powder and sugar and bring to a boil, storring occasionally. Blend with the whisk to ensure the bean puree hasn't clumped onto the bottom of the pan.
Serve hot, topped with coriander leaves and lime juice.

This was a simple recipe and fast to cook, which I always enjoy. The chilli powder, salt and sugar can all be adjusted to individual taste and the final dash of coriander and lime juice adds an amazing freshness to the taste.

Rocking Rocket

2008-01-24T00:25:00.000-08:00

Rocket is one of my favourite salad greens. The minute I see it on a menu, I'm all over it, but it's a little hard to find at local vegetable markets. Last weekend, I was lucky enough to find a big bunch of fresh rocket which I immediately grabbed, and then wondered what I could do with it.

I have a favourite salad at Diva with Rocket and Parmesan so I decided to try and re-create that. I decided to keep the salad simple and pared down so I could truly savour the wondefrul taste of the rocket leaves. All I wanted to accompany the greens were a few cherry tomatoes, halved, and some sliced red onions. I was all out of Parmesan so settled for Edam shavings.

I mixed up a standard vinaigrette - olive oil, white wine vinegar, a dash of mustard and some powdered sugar and poured it over the salad leaves and vegetables. I topped that with thin shavings of the Edam - I still think Parmesan would have worked better because it's harder and saltier, but Edam was pretty good too. And then I thought the salad was missing a little something so I halved a few walnuts and added those to the mix.

The salad was - Rocking! The textures complimented each other beautifully, and the vinaigrette helped bring out the taste of the peppery, astringent rocket leaves even better. Definitely a salad I will be making any time I find rocket...

Proud Mama

2008-01-21T20:22:00.000-08:00

I do get the proud mama feeling very often when I'm watching either of my kids do something, but I never expected to feel this way about my better one-third. Yet here I am, simply bursting with pride, and all because of a simple thing - A cooked a delicious mutton curry this weekend ( going by reports since I'm veg), that too all by himself with no help from moi since I was out of town on work. Some of you may have read my earlier post on men in the kitchen and decided that A was not one of those men cut out to do the cheffing, of a weekend.

It all started when I bought Ismail Merchant's cookbook which had A salivating over the non-veg recipes. And A made a resolution this year that he would try and cook something. The thing is, his office has a tradition of one of the people bringing in a special dish on fridays. A being a muslim, they expected his lunch to be a lot more enticing to non-veg diners, with kebabs, biryanis and meat curries being ferried regularly. They turned their noses up in disgust when faced with day after day of tori, tinda and lauki, and his reputation ( and mine) were severely challenged until the day he took this and this with him. But that still didn't spare him from the stigma of being a muslim who never brought meat dishes to the office. Which is what eventually sparked off this burning chefly desire.

So on Sunday, with a little help from our cook in terms of chopping the onions etc, A embarked on his culinary adventure. It took a long time for the mutton to be cooked to his liking, and he made it according to a recipe I had made up. Thankfully, he didn't scorch either himself or the kitchen. And as he was finishing up, our picky-eater son came running into the kitchen to indignantly demand why he hadn't been offered whatever it was that was smelling so good along with his dinner. On getting a piece, Chubbocks's hand went up in the index-finger-meets-thumb universal sign of appreciation. Which is about the best compliment going, in our house.

A and colleagues had it for lunch yesterday and A received many compliments. So, hats off to the new chef in the house! ( pictures will follow).

Mutton Curry
Ingredients:
1/2 kg mutton, cut into chunks
2 onions, chopped finely
1 inch ginger and 3 pods of garlic, minced together
15 gms almond paste
1 cup home made curds( yoghurt)
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp aamchur( dry mango powder)
1 tsp cinnamon powder
4-5 cloves
3-4 whole black peppers
1-2 tsp chilli powder
Salt to taste
2 cups hot water
1 tbsp coconut powder
Pinch turmeric
2 tbsp oil

Heat the oil in a thick-bottomed wok. Put in the turmeric, then the cumin and wait for it to turn toasty. Add the coriander powder and stir for 1-2 minutes. Pop in the cloves and peppers, add the onions and cook, stirring periodically until they turn brown. Then add the ginger-garlic paste and cook until it loses the raw smell. Add the almond paste, coconut powder, cinnamon powder, yoghurt and mutton and stir to mix well. Cook for a few minutes on low, then add the hot water, chilli powder and aamchur and salt and cover the dish. Let it cook covered for half hour and then remove the lid. Cook on a low flame until the mutton is tender - about 45 minutes or so. Serve hot with rotis or crusty bread, or with rice and a lentil dish.

Comfort Food

2008-01-18T22:37:00.000-08:00

Comfort food was the theme for two food-blog events this month - Meeta's Monthly Mingle and The Garden of Eating. Comfort food almost always implies a simplicity, an ease of preparation and of the act of eating. No fiddly bits, no last minute need to watch the dish as it hatches, no need to fool around with the sophisticated kitchen equipment which you have spent half your life and life savings to put together. It’s all about retreating to the quiet place deep inside where the world appears comforting and cozy…in many ways, comfort food is about recreating childhood.

I think that’s one of the reasons that on days when we are stressed or the world becomes too cacophonous, most of us reach into that cupboard where we store the recipes of the food our parents fed us. It reminds us of a time free from all responsibility, when we knew that someone else would be around to feed us and look after us, hurt could be healed by a simple kiss and hug and someone knew all the answers. No matter how sophisticated a palate we develop as adults, or how accomplished we become as cooks, we reproduce the food that our mothers put on the table, and for a few minutes, in the act of eating the familiar tastes of childhood, we can forget the ambiguity of life as an adult.

For me, as a South Indian, comfort food has to include rice. I grew up on it, and we ate rice everyday, at a time when no one thought carbs were the enemy. We did have rotis occasionally – the unleavened bread of India. Dad made the most exquisite rotis I have ever eaten, thin, soft and multilayered, a lovely caramel colour, with darker spots of brown which were crisp. The rotis were so delicious that we didn’t need much else by way of accompaniment, a cucumber kosambri( salad) or even just a piece of homemade lime pickle and a bowl of homemade yoghurt – curds, as we call it – was enough. There is something about food that is made with love and dedication that elevates it into balm not only for the body but the soul.

But every day food for us was rice, and a variety of lentil preparations – saaru, huli, kootu, a south-indian style salad of finely chopped or grated vegetables with a splash of lime juice, finely chopped chillies and coriander leaves and the oil seasoning – hot oil with exploded black mustard seeds and curry leaves, and a vegetable made with the same seasoning but topped with grated fresh coconut. We would occasionally have something North Indian – chholey or rajma – but this was very much the exception, indulged in only when dad was out of town, because like most South Indian men, dad is a creature of habit. A meal means rice with the lentil dish, followed by mosaru-anna – rice topped with yoghurt, had plain or with a dash of salt, with a spicy pickle on the side.

Whenever I am feeling stressed out, I reach for my repertoire of rice dishes, accompanied by a lentil gravy. That and potatoes, which are the great comfort food cutting across cultures. The potato dish that comforts me most is a crisp potato sabzi, made from chopped, boiled potatoes. In a 1 tbsp quantity of hot oil seasoning of cumin seeds, you pop in the potato pieces and cook them slowly until they turn brown and crisp on the outside. You then flavour them with salt and chilli powder, and that’s it. I find it interesting that comfort food in many cultures is about bland and soothing food – for us Indians, whatever be the emotion, food has to be spicy!

My favourite lentil gravy dish for comfort is saaru.

Saaru is made out of tamarind water, flavoured with a special mix of spices and the addition of a tomato, some jaggery and salt, and if made with a smaller quantity of lentils can even be had as soup. The taste is sweet, sour, salty and spicy all at once. You might think that such a concatenation of flavours would be confusing to the tongue and far from comforting but one sip of it and I feel all content. Saaru is a particularly fragrant dish and while making it, the whole house is redolent with the smells of that hot, spicy mixture. As a saaru aficionado, you can tell just by smelling its fragrance in different homes what it is going to taste like – will it be on the sour side, will it have the right balance of sweet and sour, will it be too thin, is the masala spicy enough…

Saaru is topped with a seasoning made by heating fresh ghee ( clarified butter) – I always use homemade ghee which tastes and smells much better. You wait for the ghee to turn hot and then drop in a teaspoon of mustard seeds. Once they are done exploding, you pop in a pinch of asafetida-which I love the smell of – and curry leaves. The saaru is garnished with this and chopped coriander leaves which make a bright green contrast to the rust-red colour of the saaru. It is had with hot rice and in my opinion, best eaten by hand. You pour the hot saaru onto the rice which you have mashed slightly in your plate so it mixes better with the liquid. You quickly mix the two together, take a small quantity and make a ball of it, using just the tips of your fingers. You scoop up a morsel of the crisp potato vegetable ( or papad which is what is in the picture) alongside and pop the mouthful into your eager mouth. Aaah...bliss!

Saaru
Ingredients:
1 - 2 tbsp saarina pudi
1 lime-size ball of tamarind, soaked in hot water
1 lime-sized ball of jaggery ( use 1 tbsp brown sugar of jaggery is unavailable)
1 tsp chilli powder ( use kashmiri chilli powder to make it less spicy)
1/2 cup pigeon peas( toovar dal) and a tomato
Pinch turmeric
Salt to taste
Handful curry leaves, washed and dried
1 tbsp home made ghee
Pinch asafoetida
1 tsp mustard seeds

Cook the pigeon peas along with a tomato in a pressure cooker or in a sauce pan with water until well cooked and mushy.
Squeeze the tamarind into the hot water and strain the brown liquid into a deep saucepan. Put it on to heat, with the pinch of turmeric, and heat for 3-4 minutes until the raw smell of the tamarind wears off. Then add the saarina pudi, chilli powder, salt, jaggery and half a cup of water and let it boil away for some time. Meanwhile, blend the cooked lentils and tomato together in a blender until mashed into a fine broth.
The fragrance of the saaru should be emanating from the tamarind-masala liquid by now. add the lentil-tomato broth and a cup and a half of water and let it come to a boil. Keep it boiling for 4-5 minutes before turning the heat off.

In a small pan, heat the ghee. Add the mustard seeds. Once they finish exploding, add the asafoetida and the curry leaves and turn off the heat. After a minute, add this to the saaru in the saucepan and top with coriander leaves.

Diva

2008-01-15T20:25:00.000-08:00

In winter, A and I have an annual tradition of visiting one of Delhi's finest stand-alone continental cuisine restaurants, Diva, at least twice. Diva has an amazing menu with periodic additions of new dishes discovered or adapted by chef and restaurateur Ritu Dalmia, and one of the best and most moderately ptriced wine lists in the country. But for us, the main attraction is the Fondue. It is rare to find it on the menu in India unless a restaurant is having a food festival or a special event, and it's a dish we love but know we can only take in winter when copious amounts of an eau de vie can be had alongside to help digest the dish.

There are several funny stories associated with Fondue for me. Years ago, in 1995, Ritu had opened her first restaurant, Mezza Luna in picturesque Hauz Khas village. The restaurant had an imaginative menu with unusual dishes like Basler Mehlsuppe, a lovely soup made of flour - which I didn't even find on the menu in Basle, by the way, as it's a highly seasonal dish - Roesti etc. I, A and BFF headed to Mezza Luna for dinner one Friday night, and the minute I saw Fondue on the menu, I begged them to order it, since I had read about it and was wildly curious. The salad came and then the Fondue. I dug into it eagerly, thoroughly enjoying my first encounter with it. A and BFF were approaching it somewhat gingerly, taking time over the salad and hesitantly dipping a few pieces of bread in. Then Ritu bustled up to us and asked how the meal was, especially the Fondue. A and BFF exchanged incredulous looks before turning to me - "This is it? Our main course? We thought it was some kind of dip, and were saving our appetites for the main course!" Anytime I ever mentioned Fondue after that - or made a menu selection, the two of them would start chortling.

Years later, when A and I were in France, our Swiss friend Roger invited a bunch of us to a Fondue dinner at his house. He has stirred up a large pot of it, complete with the garlic rubbed around the pot, the wine and the two kinds of Swiss cheese. Cubes of bread, cooked baby potatoes, tomato juliennes and pickled onions gleamed on the table alongside the bubbling cauldron of melting cheese. Roger served an eau de vie as well as some good Bordeaux and told us that we should have large quantities of the eau de vie to ensure the cheese stayed melted after we'd scoffed it down, as otherwise it was liable to form an indigestible lump in our stomachs and lay us out with a stomach ache the next day. Also, the penalty for losing your bit of bread or potato/ whatever in the fondue was to do a bottoms up of your eau de vie glass. The Fondue was delicious, and we were all pretty clutzy so a lot of EDV was washed down. The next morning, classes began at 8:30 am as usual, and there was a pallidly green and woozy group sitting at the fringes of the room, wishing the teachers wouldn't speak so loud.

Diva is a modern looking restaurant in GK II, which has come up as a market full of places to eat at various price ranges, from a Bengali Sweets type of place to Chinese to Nu Deli which is a new entrant. It has a vast fireplace on the ground floor and a pleasingly vibrant decor with white walls, coloured niches, dark wood accents and flooring and abstract paintings and prints. Ritu Dalmia, the owner, has earned her spurs first with Mezza Luna, then a restauirant in London before moving back and starting Diva several years ago. She has done a lot of research in Italian cuisine, and always has interesting dishes on the menu, apart from a small selection of Swiss-style food.

Diva used to have Fondue on the menu as either an appetizer or a main course. The quantity of the dish and the heavy, rich nature of it means that unless you're dining there in a large group, there's no way you can even treat the appetizer as anything but a main course. We usually order her Rocket salad with a deliciously zesty vinaigrette, but it was off the menu so we ordered Crostini topped with Gorgonzola and figs for starters. It was a rather small portion ( only 2 pieces) and therefore pretty expensive, though delicious.

The Fondue was heavenly as usual. It's not mentioned on the menu now, so while they do serve it, you have to know about it in advance. They serve it with cubed potatoes and bread, pickled onions and gherkins. We usually ask for cherry tomatoes which are not a traditional accompaniment, simply because they make such a fresh, tart contrast to the blandly rich cheese. Chubbocks got a Margherita pizza which was delicious too - the sauce was a fresh, young concoction of ripe tomatoes bursting with flavour. Though Tonino is my current favourite pizza place, this ran it a close second purely because of the sauce.

While we've been taking Chubbocks along with us for the past two years, we've never really thought of the restaurant as a child-friendly place. It's usually full of the chatterati and there's a cantilevered staircase and so on. This time, we had to take Puddi along as well, and just hoped it wouldn't mean that we had to take turns having our meal, because the pleasure of a Fondue is from its communalness.

We were seated upstairs, rather than downstairs, because we had the two kiddos with us. The restaurant did have a high-chair though it was rather light and therefore carries a risk of tipping over backwards. We placed the chair flush against a wall to prevent it from doing so. As soon as we were seated, the maitre d' bustled up and said hi to both the kids, and told them that is they didn't make noise, they would be rewarded with chocolate cake. Five minutes later, the chocolate tortes arrived at the table! We of course asked the serving staff to hold off and serve it later after the main course, but were bowled over by the gesture. Puddi had immediately spotted the dessert and plaintively kept calling for 'choccat' even as they were carting it away.

Chubbocks enjoyed his share of the Fondue and the pizza which he manfully struggled to finish. Puddi on the other hand didn't much care for the fondue or even the bread or potatoes by themselves - she's a home food kinda gal as of now, and created a fine pastiche of bread crumbs, mashed cherry tomato and potato and gherkins all over the floor surrounding her chair. She did enjoy her torte though, and finished most of it. The tortes, when we had the remnants after the kids were through, were delicious, with a crackly chocolate top, a crisp crust and a richly moist center with the taste of high quality dark chocolate.

When the bill came, we were pleasantly surprised and to find that the tortes had been complimentary. The meal came to about Rs. 2500 for three and was well worth the money as well as the hour-long drive from home.

Terroir

2008-01-13T05:41:00.000-08:00

I have always enjoyed the French passion for food, in particular their insistence on terroir which is what distinguishes Bordeaux from Bourgogne, Champagne from Asti Spumante. It’s a little difficult to find a single word in English that could stand in for the equivalent of terroir which is an amalgam of the soil, the climactic conditions, the water and a host of other situation and location-specific factors that give each piece of agricultural produce its distinctive taste from region to region. The French are almost fanatical about it and the way a Frenchman or woman uses the words ‘quality’ or terroir is like hearing a high priest at the temple of Ra chanting the sacred word.

It was interesting to start thinking about terroir in the context of other cuisines, thanks to Anna's cool finds blog event, A Taste of Terroir. If any other country can lay claim to the concept of terroir, I should imagine it would be India. It is popularly said that every 100 kilometres in India, the language, customs and the food changes. The concept of terroir comes into place in countries in which agricultural production is large and uses mostly traditional methods, seeds and manure. In fact, in present-day France which employs barely 2% of the population in agriculture and has among the most industrialized and modern agricultural methods in use, it may be a throwback to the past to still hold by the concept of terroir, whereas in India it would hold true. Even now, the average Indian farm is a small-holding whose farmer works using the methods he has imbibed into his very veins over generations of working the land, and plants his crop seasonally and uses the manure that he knows has always worked on his land. The Indian farmer still relies on climactic conditions to decide his bounty for the year and the quality of the rain or sun play a huge role in turning out his crop the way that it does both in taste as well as quantity.

Each Indian state has multiple types of regional cuisine, based on centuries of understanding of the people, their way of life, the work they do and the agricultural produce available to them. The type of fish eaten in a Calcutta, for example, may be very different from that eaten by the West Bengal coast, and certainly from that enjoyed by the Malabar coast. Chef Ananda Solomon of the Taj finds that coconuts grown in Orissa do not work as well for Goan cuisine as those that grow in the West. My parents, who are from South India but settled in the north claim that certain native fruit and vegetables of the South, including curry leaves, smell and taste infinitely better in their native place. What is that, if not terroir?

In urban India, pockets of terroir still live on in the city-specific speciality cuisine or ingredients. Whether it is the rich, cow’s-milk based pedas from Mathura or the foamy, light-as-air dessert made by combining sugar, saffron and milk foam in Benaras, the Shrewsbury biscuits of a Pune, the MTR of a Bangalore versus the Ghantewala Mithai and Karim’s of a Delhi.

In the North of India, dairy food is almost a religion. Milk is widely considered food of the Gods across India but nowhere is it as worshipped as complete food as in the North. All kinds of milk products, from ‘desi ghee’ (clarified butter) to pure butter made from buffalo milk to paneer to lassi, thick and foaming and sweet, are had in vaster quantities than anywhere else in India. Paneer – a cottage cheese made by curdling plain milk and pressing it down into a solid form – is given a place of honour in Punjabi homes. Paneer per se has no taste of its own and looks a little like Styrofoam - and sometimes tastes like it too. It takes on the taste of whatever mélange of gravies and spices it is cooked with, and is variously mixed with peas and onions, a creamy tomato gravy or pureed spinach and spices to form a vegetable accompaniment to rotis, the unleavened bread of India. It is also served cooked in a clay oven or tandoor after being marinated with a spicy yoghurt-based marinade which gives the paneer a wonderfully smoky-spicy taste.

Delhi has a reputation for being a foodie, if conservative city. From ancient days, Delhi has been a capital city to a number of different types of rulers from different dynasties and cultures, and therefore offers a wide mix of cuisines and has what I call a large stomach – Delhi lives for its food. From Old Delhi, which has a whole street devoted to parathas – the stuffed unleavened breads fried in butter – to the varieties of chaat that it has, to Karim’s which is famous for Mughlai cuisine, every nook of the city has a food speciality. City natives know that there is a specific samose-wala who makes the best samosas, and one bhelpuri wala who makes the best bhel, one dahi wada seller who has the best and creamiest dahi wadas…

In keeping with its foodie tradition, Delhi also has a special shop selling paneer, which exemplifies the concept of terroir. While ordinary white paneer is available just about anywhere, this shopkeeper serves a unique type of paneer. He mixes finely chopped ginger, fenugreek laves, coriander seeds and leaves and other spices right into the curdled milk to produce an interestingly spicy and fragrant variety of paneer. He is famous for this one product and Delhi-ites in the know line up at the shop to take it away.
I had not heard of this until recently when BFF was visiting Delhi. I promptly sent off my driver and factotum to procure some of this paneer for us, while I pondered what to do with it. It would be a travesty to let this paneer hide its light under a bushel, so to speak, in a traditional gravy. Then inspiration struck, and I decided to serve it simply grilled in the oven, with a sprinkling of salt, along with Muhammara of which I had just whipped up a batch.

We raced through 250 grams of this in minutes, so tasty was it, and didn’t even end up using the Muhammara which otherwise is wolfed down with almost anything. I grilled this paneer lightly, so that it didn’t get that squeaky-rubbery taste which over-cooked paneer invariably gets, and the salt helped bring out the flavours of the embedded spices. It worked wonderfully as a starter and I can see myself regularly serving it when we entertain.

While still contemplating the concept of terroir some time ago, we visited my aunt-in-law for lunch and she fed us an unusual Halwa. Halwa is a dessert made using milk, sugar and the main ingredient which ranges from semolina to vermicelli to various vegetables. The halwa we had was made of black carrots and was a speciality of Allahabad. Now red carrot halwa is a seasonal dessert that is made quite regularly during winter when the red carrot crop comes into its own, but I had never seen this dish made of black carrots.

Black carrots are a winter vegetable only typically grown in North India, particularly Punjab and UP, and drunk, not eaten. That is, their juice is made into Kanji or carrot juice, topped with a sprinkling of rock salt and a spritz of lime juice, and considered both delicious and good for health. I have never enjoyed Kanji and therefore never bought black carrots for use at home. But this halwa sounded intriguing and I couldn’t wait to try it on my own. One thing that struck me was that this was much richer in taste than the typical carrot halwa. I usually make carrot halwa using barely ½ tbsp of ghee, which is only used to fry cashews for garnishing the dish, since I feel the fat from the fullcream milk is quite enough. But this recipe needed some tweaking and I thought about it during the week as I went about my official job. I figured that the black carrots needed to be sautéed in home made ghee first and only then cooked with milk and sugar. That would make them less likely to mush down and lose texture and add the rich, lush taste of the Halwa we had had.

The grated black carrots look more like a deep, deep purple – almost black but the purple shows through in the sunlight. Just looking at them gets me all excited. I drop the matt black mass of finely grated carrots into a wok and slowly cook them in the ghee. The wonderfully nutty, enticing aroma of ghee fills the house and I take in a deep breath. The grated carrots are glistening in the fat of the ghee and I figure it’s time to add in the full cream milk. I pour it into the wok and pause to marvel at the lovely lilac-mauve colour in the pan.
Red carrots turn the milk a pale, uninteresting red but this colour has promise and exoticity. I struggle to capture its beauty in the photographs, taking the pan off the stove and into the sun, but remain by and large defeated – not using the flash means the mixture just looks dark brown while using it means the richness of the ghee glitters into the lens and prevents the colour from coming through. Well, you’ll just have to take my word for it – it looks like something that should be served to royalty.

I add in sugar and watch the tiny crystal cubes shine on the surface of the violet liquid like diamonds on a crown and then slowly dissolve and lose themselves in the mad swirl of the inky mass. It is a slow-cooking process, and you can become completely tranquillized in the repetitive yet occasional movements of stirring the halwa and returning to a contemplative state. I wonder who the primal man was who discovered that these things were good to eat. Fruit one can well imagine attracted attention by their colour and because they were hitting people walking under the trees in their faces, but vegetables, especially those that grow below the ground like carrots? Black coloured vegetables?

It takes a long time for the simmering liquid to slowly evaporate, permeating its richness into the carrots. At long last it is finished, and I stare down at the black mass that promises a lush sensation for the senses. I roast some cashews in ghee and pour them on top of the caviar-ey halwa. They are a nice rust-red contrast to the dark colour which remains a rather inky violet even in the sunlight. The halwa colour reminds me of the tropical night, that magical, mysterious interplay of black and blue.
I have my usual struggle to take pictures that do justice to the dish and finally, finally, we pop some into our mouths. I have waited for this dish the way one waits for a treat – impatiently and yet, when the treat arrives, you approach hesitantly so you can savour the anticipation of its enjoyment for a few moments more. It doesn’t disappoint – the halwa is rich, with a full-bodied flavour that matches the intensity of its colour. I lose myself in the intense dark taste that lingers on my tongue long after the morsel has disappeared down my throat. The texture of the grated carrot which has softened but not melted jostles against the crunchy hardness cashews, and their cheesy sweetness offsets the fruity flavour of the carrots. The unctuous mellowness of the milk solids coats the mouth silkily. The sensation of the halwa on the tongue is luxurious…if Cabernet Sauvignon could be made into a dish, this would be it, I think and reach for another mouthful.

Veggie dinners

2008-01-10T19:45:00.000-08:00

I have never understood the aversion to Brussels Sprouts that many people profess. Maybe if you eat them boiled, I suppose they wouldn't taste like anything much, but sauteed or baked in a creamy, cheesy sauce, this vegetable is delicious. We only get access to BS in the winter here, so whenever I see packets of this small, delicate looking cabbagey vegetable, I instantly pick it up. I've had it cooked many different ways, but when I have to leave it to my cook, I just get her to rustle up a simple, Indian style sabzi - slice the brussels sprouts finely and cook in a seasoning of oil with roast cumin seeds, then add some chilli powder and salt. If cooked until slightly soft but still crunchy, this makes a great accompaniment to rotis or rice and dal. The bitter-sweet taste of the vegetable really shines through in this simple dressing. It also tastes good in an open sandwich - just top a slice of lightly buttered bread with this, some cheese and grill until the cheese turns melty. The crunchy brussels sprouts taste adds a nice texture.

One type of vegetable that I typically don't enjoy is the ones that are sweetish. That includes sweet potatoes, over-ripe pumpkins and chayote. In fact, we typically don't buy sweet potatoes very often, because I'm always stumped as to what to do to them.

Well, yesterday we had a food disaster at home. The gas cylinder was finished, and there was some problem with the spare one, so the nozzle just didn't fit properly. We borrowed a cylinder from the neighbours but the nozzle seemed to be the problem. So there we were, with no rotis or rice for dinner, and the ground masala for chholia ke kebab just sitting there helplessly. I didn't feel like making do with bread, and then my eye fell upon the sweet potatoes which had been sitting in the kitchen since my last sabzi mandi expedition a week ago. "I'll try baking them", I thought, and promptly wrapped them up in foil, carefully pricking them over with a fork because I do not want things exploding all over the kitchen. I also washed and wrapped up a potato to keep in reserve, and popped the veggies into the oven at 250 degrees for about 50 minutes.

Meanwhile, I put a lump of home made plain yoghurt into a muslin cloth, tied that tightly and left it hanging over the washbasin to let the liquid drip away. I had some chives which I snipped into 1 cm segments - I love doing that. When the yoghurt had stopped dripping, I unfolded the cloth and turned the yoghurt over into a wide bowl. I added the snipped chives and a dash of salt and stirred it up nicely and parked the dip into the refrigerator to cool while the potatoes cooked.

The sweet potatoes were a tiny bit overcooked, and probably need less time - say 35 minutes - in the oven. The sweet potato juice had oozed out and coated parts of the skin which had turned caramelized. The potato was nicely done, with its skin nice and crunchy. I quickly brushed a bit of salted butter over the split halves of the sweet and plain potatoes and served them up with a dollop of yoghurt dip on the side. The yoghurt dip is a great low-cal substitute for sour cream with chives, by the way.

I really enjoyed the sweet potatoes this way, with the sweetness brought up to a smoky point, and the hard caramelized skin to crunch into as if it were candy - if you look at the picture above, you can see the caramelized bits. I'm already pondering over the possibilities of whipping up some honey mustard or hot-sweet chinese or Thai style sauce to serve with it next time. And the roast potato of course tasted delicious with the fake sour cream dip. It turned out to be a pretty satisfying dinner, despite the lack of bread and multiple things to eat - simple, wholesome and surprising. What more can one ask for?

Garlic

2008-01-10T02:46:00.000-08:00

Garlic is one of the ingredients proscribed by yoga, because it is considered to be rajsik, or heat and emotion-inducing. Well, I dunno if it's the garlic I eat but I'm a pretty volatile person. I love garlic on almost anything except desserts - garlic soup, garlic mashed potatoes, garlic aloo tikkis and what not. My favourite way to spice up a simple and bland dal - which my cook sometimes turns out - is to quickly fry a little bit of garlic slivers in oil and garnish the dal. It instantly perks it up and breathes life and savour into it.

Garlic is also often used as a curative. When I had brochitis attacks as a kid in Mysore, ajji used to get roasted garlic pods and make me eat them. It's also used in masala or pepper rasam sometimes to keep cough and cold at bay ( or maybe just to get through to the palate despite the stuffy nose :))And if I needed any excuse to overuse garlic, it's also considered to be good for cholesterol and for anti-ageing. And of course, it keeps away vampires too!

I rounded up a whole list of dishes I made recently in which garlic was a star contributor to the taste, including my secret sauce, muhammara and soup. But what I made specially for Sunita's event was the sagu. Sagu is a typical Karnataka dish made with mixed vegetables cooked in a juicy sauce. It's had served hot with fresh puris, but also tastes great with rice or rotis or even with a baguette dunked into it. In France, since frozen mixed veggies were easily available and a breeze to cook, sagu often found its way on the menu, though perforce I had to use dessicated coconut instead of fresh since we couldn't find a way to break the fresh coconuts we got there - they were too hard, even when hit with a hammer!

I also made my winter staple of saaru with dill and garlic. This is a variant of the traditional rasam and works equally well as a soup or served with hot rice. I had earlier given the recipe for saarina pudi or rasam powder on my blog - you can link to it from the garlic soup link above.

Sagu
Ingredients:
I cup each each of beans, carrots, potatoes, cauliflower, peas and broccoli if you like, and 1 onion. The beans, carrots and potatoes to be cut into 2 inch long pieces, about 1 cm thick. Onion diced large.
1/2 coconut, grated ( use fresh, else soak dessicated coconut - 1 cup - in hot water)
4-5 garlic pods, peeled
2 inch stick of cinnamon
4-5 cloves
3-4 black peppers
2-3 green chillies
1 large handful coriander leaves
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 handful roasted chana dal - roast peeled bengal gram, available at Indian grocery stores( bhuna hua chana)

Grind the coconut, garlic, chana, coriander, chillies, cinnamon, cloves, pepper and cumin seeds together until finely ground.
Meanwhile, cook the cut vegetables in a litre of salted water, starting with the slowest cooking and moving onto the faster ones, e.g. start with potatoes. When they're slightly done, add the carrots, then the beans, then the cauliflower, then the peas and broccoli and lastly the onions.
When all the vegetables are cooked till soft but not mushy, add the ground mixture into this, stir to mix and bring to the boil.
Turn off the heat and garnish with a traditional south indian tadka - heat 1 tbsp oil and add black mustard seeds into it. When they are done popping, put in a dried red chilli and handful of curry leaves and turn off the heat.

Dill-Garlic Rasam
Ingredients:
Handful of dill leaves, chopped into 1 cm segments
3-4 pods of garlic, peeled
1 tsp cumin seeds
1 tbsp rasam powder
1 lime sized ball of tamarind, soaked in 1 cup hot water for 15 minutes
1 cup cooked toovar dal ( pigeon peas)
1/2 tsp turmeric powder
Salt to taste

Pound the dill, garlic and cumin seeds together in a mortar until they are well cruched and mixed up.
Squeeze the tamarind ball in the hot water to get all the juice out and strain the tamarind water. put it on to boil, until the raw smell of the tamarind goes away.
Then add the rasam powder, turmeric powder and the garlic-dill leaves-cumin seeds mixture and let it boil for a few minutes.
When the kitchen turns spicily fragrant, add the toovar dal and 1/2 litre of water. You can add a little more or less water to thin out the dal to your liking.
Bring to the boil and then turn off the heat.
Garnish with the tadka - 1 tbsp home made ghee, melted on the stove; then add mustard seeds into it and wait for the pop, and lastly add curry leaves and wait till they turn crisp.

Veggie Twists

2008-01-07T19:56:00.000-08:00

Sometimes I get a bit tired and bored of having my veggies the typical desi way - tadka and all. Last weekend while shopping for veggies, I spotted a selection of orange baby carrots. Now baby carrots is something you'll find at fine dining places in Delhi but rarely in markets, so I bagged some immediately, of course. I'm an onion freak too - onions in any form, red, white, spring, leeks, chives...so when I spotted a bunch of really tender onion stalks, with the onion flowers still on them, I bagged those too.

Then came the quandary - how to cook these? I didn't want to make a standard sabzi with the baby carrots - what would be the point - and didn't just want to use the onion stalks in a salad - same reason. So I pondered and racked my brain and at last hit upon it. I decided to make glazed carrots - having never had them before. It sounded different, at least, and would work for these small carrots. The onions, I decided to leave up to whatever inspiration hit me when I started my cooking.

So, having a vague idea that glazing involved cooking with sugar, I chopped the baby carrots into thirds (they weren't infant carrots that I could have cooked whole - more like toddler carrots) and dug out my trusty Amul butter. I love recipes that ask for cooking with butter.

Having coated all the carrots with melted butter, I put a lid on the frying pan to let the carrots steam while I chopped the onion stalks into 3 inch pieces. Since the butter was already out, it seemed like a good idea to cook the onion stalks with it too, so I popped a blob of butter in the frying pan and parked the onions in it and stirred them around.

Meanwhile, the carrots had been stewing in their own juices for a while so having checked to see if they were somewhat tender, I sprinkled a tablespoon or two of sugar over them and stirred them to mix up the sugar on all sides. The sugar started caramelizing and I stirred up the carrots some more to ensure they were nicely coated with melted sugar. When the carrots started browning, I added half a cup of water to the pan and popped the lid back on to let them simmer.
I turned back to the onion stalks to find that they had cooked nicely, still crisp with little browned bits here and there. I have had balsamic reductions at various restaurants so decided to try making it but without the bother of hunting for a formal recipe. So I pulled out my modena balsamic vinegar and poured a shot of it into the frying pan. that was fun but I wasn't satisfied, so I also added a glug of Shiraz which was sitting out on the counter, along with a sprinkling of freshly and coarsely ground black pepper. I stirred it around for a while until the wine and vinegar boiled away, leaving the onion stalks bright green and shiny with brown beads of moisture here and there.
Meanwhile, I opened the lid off the carrots and let the water evaporate. The carrots were nice and tender at this point, so I sprinkled a handful of chopped dill over them and brought the carrots and onion stalks to the table with a flourish. The carrots were juicy and sweet, with a caramelized-carrot flavour which was interesting, while the onion stalks were tender, and an interesting mixture of the sharp onion taste and crunchy texture combined with the sweet sourness of the balsamic vinegar and wine and the slow fire of the ground pepper. That, along with a mild cauliflower soup made for an interesting dinner, a composition of contrasting flavours and textures that played off each other really well.

Deeply Dippy

2008-01-06T21:09:00.000-08:00

I don't know if you've seen a trend through my blogs. I noticed that the categories that pop up most frequently are soups and dips. Well, soup is one of my favourite things to cook and to eat, and I simply love having a collection of dips on hand, to accompany anything, from idlis and vadas to paneer, bread, crackers, crudites, chips, mini-blinis and so on.

In the winter, when the prices of bell peppers falls to about Rs. 100 a kilo, I run amock buying them up for all manner of uses, from eating them grilled to julienning them for salads or making them into soups, adding them to pasta...Red bell pepper has two special uses for me. One is in a roasted red pepper soup which is one of the most divine soups I have ever had. The other is to make Muhammara ( the third, which I recently discovered, is to make the secret sauce of the Marais restaurant).

Muhammara is a lebanese sauce, meant to be had with fattoush or pita bread. But frankly, it is such a lush thing that I can have it with almost anything, or even spend a messy half hour dipping my finger into a cup full and licking it off. In fact, I've just had a brainwave that suggests that I try it as a pasta sauce. The taste is tongue-tingling and yet gentle so it's a very inviting dip. And it requires roast bell peppers, than which what could be more delicious?

Muhammara
Ingredients:
Red bell pepper - 200 grams
1/3rd cup pine nuts, lightly toasted
3-4 garlic cloves
1 tsp pomegranate molasses ( not having any, I usually use plain old anardana - pomegranata seeds, available at any indian grocery store)
1/2-1 tbsp sugar (to taste)
1 tsp chilli powder
Juice of half lemon
1/2 cup fresh breadcrumbs
1 tsp salt
1/4 cup good quality extra virgin olive oil

Roast the bell pepper until the skin is charred. Cool, peel and deseed and chop into chunks.
Run all the ingredients except the olive oil in the blender until finely pureed together.
Add the olive oil little by little into the running blender until well-blended with the sauce.
Remove and enjoy with anything!

Over the weekend, I served this with a grilled masala paneer which is a Delhi specialty. Mmm!

JFI Chocolate

2008-01-05T09:25:00.000-08:00

Chocolate…the elixir of the gods…I wonder who was the intrepid south American explorer who first discovered the cacao bean, who thought of curing it and how someone thought of adding some sweetness to it…Whoever came up with each of these should be awarded the Nobel prize for science – or gastronomy if there is such a thing. A simple bite of chocolate is enough to make you forget the tiff you had with your better one-third, the argument with the boss, your weight loss struggles…a whiff of that warm chocolatey smell, which somehow exudes decadence and luxury, and you’re in another world altogether.

All the more reason for welcoming Jihva for ingredients’s January theme of chocolate. I thought I was in heaven!

I have tons of chocolate recipes but for a blogging challenge, I always like to try out something new. Last month when my BFF was in town, she visited the re-opened Olive in Delhi, and came back raving about their chocolate cakes with melting chocolate inside. Now this is one dish which I had always wanted to make, it seemed like such an interesting challenge. I have to admit, I don’t exactly shine as a baker, because I often get either the timing or the temperature setting wrong – or, even more infuriating, my temperamental oven decides to screw up one of the two things for me. Give me a bog-standard cake or muffin and it’s easy-peasy but the more complex cakes are always a little like Russian Roulette. But, since I was feeling like taking a gamble, I thought I could try out a melting chocolate dessert.

I remembered having drooled over a recipe for something like this in Nigella Lawson’s Domestic Goddess, so I pulled the book out, and the minute I read the title of the cakes, I was hooked. How can anyone resist any dessert which has the words molten and chocolate entwined? So I gathered all my gumption and said, ok, this is one I’m not going to screw up. The photographs of it, perhaps, possibly and probably ( I did, as you will see), but the actual dish, no. And the best is that the dish seems so complex everyone stares at you as if you have a cordon blue halo when you produce it.

This has to be, honestly, one of the best desserts I’ve ever had. Because, like the best chocolate desserts, it’s meant to be eaten hot, fresh from the oven. Don’t get me wrong, I’ll take a chocolate mousse if that’s the only chocolate dessert on the menu, but frankly chocolate mousses are all wrong. Mousses are light, airy, flirty little things, not meant to be weighted down with the serious elegance or sensuous decadence of chocolate. They are meant to have a little tango with fruit – a mango, perhaps, or strawberries. Mousses are like chiffon, summery and floaty.

Chocolate, on the other hand, is inherently sinful, like silk and brocade and velvet. It’s meant to be serious and rich and to induce reverence. You can’t play with chocolate, at least, not the best quality chocolate. You have to luxuriate in it, to soak in the heady lushness of the experience. Chocolate desserts have to be melt-in-the-mouth, and to do justice to the food of the gods, to be warm and gooey and aromatic…

My in-laws were visiting for the first time since the New Year began, so I decided to serve this after dinner on Saturday. Of course, my temperamental oven kicked in right away by switching itself off 2 minutes into the 12 minute baking time, which meant I had raw batter right when everyone was waiting, bouche béant, for the treat I had been promising all evening. I have probably not watched my new-born children with as much anxiety as I did the oven the second time I set it on to bake my little baby cakes. And of course, being me, I couldn’t resist foozling around with the recipe so I added a teaspoon of chilli powder which added a nice kick and back of the throat heat to the molten-ness of the cakes. Thankfully, I made up some extra batter, so tomorrow I get to relish this all over again, only without the added stress of having to get it right in front of my in-laws – and I’m already mulling over the possibility of adding some Frangelico to take the wicked up a notch! Mmm…PS. Have I thanked you for picking chocolate for the theme?

Molten Chocolate Babycakes
Ingredients:
350 grams best quality dark chocolate, softened
150 gms caster sugar
50 gms good butter ( try and get French butter if possible), softened
1 tsp vanilla - or Frangelico/ Godiva, maybe even Tia Maria - or Cointreau...Drambuie...ok, now I'm drooling all over again!
50 gms flour ( Nigella recommends Italian 00 which I don’t know what it is – I just used plain maida)
4 eggs
Pinch salt

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees C ( if baking right away).
Grease 6 pudding cups ( I used aluminum muffin cups, not having any other kind to hand, but am immediately inspired to invest in ceramic ramekins, since I think the possibility of making these on a regular basis is quite high) and line the bottoms with baking sheet.
Cream the butter and sugar together.
Add the eggs and the salt and beat together.
Add the vanilla and the flour and blend together well.
Scrape in the softened chocolate ( try not to be greedy enough to leave lots behind in the bowl so you can lick it off all by yourself!) and blend the batter well together.
Pour into the pudding pans and pop into the oven for 10 minutes.
If not baking these immediately, you can make the batter ahead of time and keep it in the fridge. In that case, keep the timer at 12 minutes for the baking process.
As soon as it’s done – the tops will look done, but don’t pop in a knife to check, the inside will be wet unlike a conventional cake – take out of the oven and invert onto individual dessert plates or shallow bowls.

Nigella recommends serving this with whipped cream, crème fraiche or icecream. Even a garnish of fresh strawberries would go well with the dessert. But I personally felt nothing – but nothing – at all was needed with this dessert, it was perfect all by itself. Maybe I could have decorated the plate a bit, and I might do, if serving at a party, but this was my first time and I was too anxious to photograph them ( as usual the photos do not do justice to the yum-ness - they are crap!), and then to dive into the delectation before it cooled down.
Also, NB – asbestos hands – or double layer of oven mitts – will help, because you have to serve this fast, while the pudding cups are still burning hot.

Note to self, and readers - if you invest in nice looking and good quality ramekins, you can forget all about the fiddling around inverting the babycakes onto a plate business and simply serve it right out of the ramekins you baked in. This is a double blessing - first because no ouchies burning your fingers while inverting cakes and so on, and second, because the cake can turn out more molten than you thought or planned on ( they did for me), and so when you're inverting, the molten chocolate goops out all over the plate.

Basil and Thyme

2008-01-04T00:00:00.001-08:00

Long years ago, when Delhi was a forgotten culinary outpost with butter chicken and paneer the sole 'haute cuisine' that the city could aspire to, along came General Maneckshaw's daughter-in-law Bhikoo to coax our jaded tastebuds into life again. To do this, she opened a little continental restaurant in a charming little marketplace set aside for servicemen's wives/ widows, known as Santhusthi, near the Ashoka hotel in Delhi - and a stone's throw away from the PM's residence on Safdarjung Road.

Continental, yet, in a city which thought continental meant over-cooking an ill-matched assortment of vegetables in a bland white sauce and then baking the dish to death. Basil and Thyme served quiche - think of that! - and salad which had julienned purple cabbage and sprouts, iced tea and filo parcels, leek tarts and omelettes with fines herbes, risottos and cheesecakes and plum-ginger juice. Naturally, then, the early visitors were only the diplomats who abound in this city and the well-heeled and travelled. At any lunch in this place, you could spot the glitterati and the chatterati, cheek by cheek, mwah-mwah-ing over the largely French menu which changed every 90 days.

Eventually, along came the not-so-well-heeled but somewhat travelled and adventurous folks like us. Santhusthi was a favourite hang-out for my BFF and I, a bare 15 minute distance from our respective offices and therefore a pretty good lunch destination if we didn't hurry back. Plus add the fun of browsing through the tiny little swiss-cottage-like shops with their large picture windows full of unique little objects.

Way back in the late '80s' before the complex came up the way it did, I remember my friend Rohit had his 21st birthday party here. The complex has lush grass which looks like they flew it in from Switzerland, so soft and thick is it. The party was held exactly where Basil and Thyme now stands, and you had to cross a tiny little raised bridge over a conduit to get to the party area, which looked like a fairy-tale place with all the trees decked in tiny little sparkling lights.

So Santhusthi must have come up as the shopping plaza in the early 90s. Good Earth had one of its first Delhi stores here, and I remember each time we lunched at B&T we'd pause at Good Earth and gaze longingly at their crockery. A store called Ananya, which still exists, sold clothes by Bangalore designers we'd never heard of, and Ensemble still has a beautiful store in here, as do Anokhi, Christina and Shyam Ahuja.

The restaurant itself has a minimalist ( if not minimal) decor - large picture windows looking onto lush greenery, white linen covered tables, simple chairs. Sometimes a potted palm in the corner, and in summer a noisy pedestal fan every few tables. The restaurant is still as packed as always, though on our last venture there in December when BFF was visiting from Bombay, we didn't spot any chatterati/ glitterati - not even a politician on the wane. But we still had to book a table in advance - and you have to be a regular to know which table to book, otherwise you'll be stuck in a corner without windows.

We entered the world of French food sportingly, if somewhat hesitantly, starting with the somewhat better known and then moving on to the more exotic items in the menu - exotic for us that is, including Asparagus in Hollandaise sauce. Now being old faithfuls ( though less frequent due to living in a far flung suburb), we are familiar with the style of food and therefore order at ease. The food is simply prepared and beautifully presented, though again in a minimalist manner. It is delicious, whether you have the soup (BFF had the carrot soup) or the salads ( we had a wonderful tomato salad with bocconcini - amongst the best bocconcini I've ever tasted, and another with rocket which is my favourite green leafy) or the quiches. A had a chicken main course which he declared superb. For dessert, we stuck to old favourite Gateau Zara which is a meltingly rich chocolate gateau. Lunch for three would have come to about Rs. 2000.

A meal at B&T is about more than the food. Somehow the unpretentious ambience and the excellence of the food combined with the verdure you see out of the windows make it an experience in which you are lifted out of the traffic-heavy neighbourhood of Delhi into a quieter, calmer, more civilized place where people don't need to bark into their cellphones every half second or honk their car horns incessantly. Maybe it's the discreet hush that follows genuine money?

The secret is out!

2008-01-02T21:11:00.000-08:00

Years ago, when we lived in France, during one break at college, a friend who had lived and travelled through Paris and knew it intimately offered to take us on a personalised tour. For dinner, she tooks us to a wonderful, tiny little restaurant in the Marais - the jewish and gay district of Paris. The Marais has a mysterious air redolent with atmosphere, with tiny, jewel-like little shops selling unexpected fashions, flickering candles in store windows, narrow cobbled streets and the feeling that around each blind street corner, you'll discover something unique.

There are tiny little restaurants, some in the middle of pocket-handkerchief sized squares, with tables set under green umbrellas, and some holes in the wall, with tantalizing aromas wafting into the crowded streets. The one we went to was run by a jewish couple in their sixties, bursting at the seams with diners. We crowded around one of the few empty tables left and ordered from the selection of lebanese cuisine - felafel, stuffed into pita pockets with Turkish salad of grilled eggplant with onions and lettuce and roasted tomatoes, drizzled with the most incredible sauce, which had a secret recipe known only to the owners of the restaurant...

The food was terrific, and the restaurant had photos of the owners with several Hollywood stars who apparently always make a beeline for this place - Uma Thurman, Johnny Depp, Richard Gere, among others...But what made the place a must-visit time after time was the sauce. It would have made soggy cabbage taste good, so amazingly flavourful was it. You could buy some, if you whinged in front of the owner, and I promptly did so. Even at home, with none of the fixings available to me, this sauce was wonderful drizzled over a baguette with cheese on top or with crackers, tangy, spicy, pungent with garlic in the best way...

I had to find a way to make the sauce, I thought. I experimented over the years but nothing quite tasted or even smelled the same. I had a tiny amount of the original sauce frozen and put away so I could take it out to compare with the ones I experimented with at home. No go...and so I eventually gave up, while hanging on to the frozen cube and moved on to other food experiments. Until last week, when, quite suddenly, inspiration hit me while reading a recipe for harissa. No, the sauce wasn't harissa nor Ranjaka but some elements seemed familiar and I decided to give it one more bash...

And this time I have succeeded. Eureka! Eureka! ( No, I am not running around the city naked from my bath!) How did I do it?

First, I roasted a good, ripe avocado-sized red bell pepper and two tomatoes.
While the vegetables were roasting, I got out my brass mortar and pestle and ground half a tablespoon of cumin seeds into smithereens, with a rollicking dash and smash.
I minced up a handful of coriander leaves.
We pulled out 5 garlic cloves and peeled them and smashed them down with the flat of the knife.
When the pepper and tomatoes were nicely browned, I popped them into a ziplock bag to cool down. They peel easily that way and you don't waste any of the juice.
Once they were peeled and the peppers de-seeded, I blended everything together in my small blender ( yes, we lost half the sauce because it dribbled, at first, and then frankly flew out of the blender to plaster itself all over the kitchen), with a dash of chilli flakes ( from the many packets generously handed out with home delivered pizza from pizza hut and carefully preserved for such uses by me) and salt. I added a drizzle of lime juice from half a lime, and 1/4th cup of good virgin olive oil.

It smells just like the oroginal, and if my tastebuds haven't lost their memory ( okay, I'm not going to dip into the frozen cube of sauce - it's five years old), it taste just like that one too.

Funny eh? I thought the recipe was going to be much more complicated and arcane, and I bet when you're reading the recipe you're thinking -gee, that's an easy one. Wonder why it took her five years to figure it out. Well, I did say on one of my blogs that I was a late bloomer!

So here is the secret, decoded for you. Enjoy. I will post pictures as soon as I get our slightly temperamental camera to work! PS. Go easy on the lime juice if the tomatoes are on the sour side.

Potage st. germain

2008-01-02T04:08:00.000-08:00

In complete contrast to what the weather-man forecast - or perhaps just to spite him - Delhi has been crystal clear for the past few days, with not a hint of fog. Obviously the wrong day for pea soup, given that's what fog is typically described as, eh?

But, having lost my voice ( yes, literally and not literarily. I've been reduced to a hoarse whisper which makes anything I say sound either menacing or sexy, take your pick!), I thought a bit of throat relief in the form of a nice, hot bowl of soup wouldn't go amiss. Plus with all the eating out I had been indulging in over the past few days, I decided a veggie-supreme type dinner was called for.

In the summer, all you get in Delhi are frozen peas. Peas which just about qualify because of being green, spherical objects, but nowhere close to the essence of pea-ness - that soft scrunchiness and the sweet, sweet flavour that only young, fresh peas can have. In summer, peas are used to round out meals or make them more filling - add them liberally to provencale soups, uppittu or a paneer sabzi where the dry leatheriness they acquire in the process of being frozen gets masked by the spices. But in winter, fresh, tender young peas call for recipes in which they can shine in the spotlight. Last week at the sabzi mandi, while buying our vegetables, my son and I also sneaked and ate up dozens of young peas from the stack, freshly podded and popped in, and sweeter than any candy.

Yesterday when I held the bowl of green gems, I wanted to make a soup that wouldn't hide their sweet and innocent flavour but bring that out further. I decided to try a simple French soup, known as Potage St. Germain, apparently because it used to be served at that marketplace, according to my handy dandy soup cookbook. It's also simple to make, which automatically gives it extra points. A nice, soothing bowlful on a cold day...

Ingredients:

3 cups fresh young peas ( this is not a recipe that works with frozen leather peas)

1 large red onion, cut into chunks

I had to innovate so I added fresh green garlic, which - I have to be honest - just faded into the pea taste and so was not required

Salt and pepper to taste

3/4 litre water or stock

Knob butter

1/3 cup cream ( or non-sour plain yoghurt if trying to be healthy)

I love recipes which call for knobs of butter, don't you? One feels all decadent and French while it slowly melts on a low flame.

Melt said knob of butter. Add the onion - and garlic if using - and cook, stirring, until translucent. Add the peas and 1/3rd of the stock if lazy and blender-ally challenged a la moi. Turn the heat up and allow the stock to come to a boil. Cook until the peas are soft but not mushy and haven't lost their bright green colour.

Cool and mush up in the blender. Remove and pour back in the saucepan. Add the rest of the stock/ water and salt and papper. Add the cream and heat until hot but before boiling point ( that curdles the cream). Serve with croutons or by itself. Try and undersalt it a bit if the peas are really sweet, so you can savour their natural taste.

If the peas aren't as sweet as you thought or if you've been careless like me and oversalted the soup, add toned milk until the salt flavour goes down, and a dash of sugar ( 1/2 tbsp).

Light meals

2007-12-31T00:38:00.000-08:00

Yesterday we decided to have an advance New Year's celebration dinner with my parents, leaving today free to PARTY!!! We'd had a rather filling meal at my aunt-in-law's house at lunch time, including a wonderful Black carrot halwa which I'm going to try out asap and blog about, and was totally awesome. Keeping our full stomachs in mind, mom and dad cooked up a great but light meal for us.

That included my favourite starter - salad - with mom's famous vegetable dip. This is a scrumptious dip of which no amount is enough. In fact, yesterday I got to thinking what all we could use it for, including as a sandwich spread, among other uses, or even with hot baingan pakoras. It also works well with kids who can scarf down any amount of crunchy fresh veggies or toast with this spread on it. My kids were in seventh heaven with salad, which they love, and a dahi-based dip.

Mom's famous yoghurt dip

Ingredients:

1 cup hung plain home made curd/ yoghurt

1 cup paneer, finely grated

Handful dhania( coriander) leaves, chopped fine

1-2 green chillies, chopped fine

Salt to taste

Just mix all the ingredients together and chill before serving with batons of crisp radish, daikon, carrots, baby corn, tomatoes, halved cherry tomatoes, lightly steamed broccoli and green peppers, raw yellow, orange and red bellpeppers and spring onions or leeks. Dad had also added lettuce as the base for the vegetables, marinated in apple-vinegar. Delicious!

Now that's a positively reeking-with-health type of last entry for the year. Just in time for me to go hog-wild partying tonight. See y'all next year!

Vegetarian kebabs

2007-12-27T01:47:00.000-08:00

I first discovered I enjoyed cooking when we went to France. Before that, for years mom had tried to teach me how to cook, considering it an essential lifeskill, but I was too busy being a feminist and wondering why only girls needed to learn how to cook. The fact that my dad and all my uncles are ace cooks didn't once enter my mind. So I learnt to cook a couple of things ( you have to, if you want to impress a guy, regardless of how 'liberated' he is. For some reason, they consider cooking only slightly less impressive than nuclear fission.) Cakes and cookies, Hyderabadi dahi wadas, rajma and chole...things which couldn't have counted as a meal but worked nicely as accents and took the spotlight.

In France, it was a case of necessity. Vegetarian me was not too impressed at being confronted by an array of 'ghaas-phoos' ( green leaves) for lunch at the college canteen every day. And the health freak and weight-watcher in me wanted to be careful around the spread of cheeses, breads and desserts. So I had no choice. I had gone armed with a bunch of Tarla Dalal books, some recipes of mom's that my sister had written down and I got photocopied, a Hawkins pressure cooker, a Sumeet mixie and a few spices. Mom had even gone to the trouble of drying out curry leaves in the microwave and packing them for me, as well as a year's supply of saaru and huli pudi. I also learnt to surf the net ( google wasn't around yet) and download or print out recipes of dishes I particularly loved, like Bisi bele bhaath. During the course of the year, while whipping out an array of dishes, from khatte baingan and haak to vangi bhaath and even trying my hand at kodbale, I realised what a wonderfully cathartic and yet creative experience cooking can be. The entire chain of work - from the physical - chopping the vegetables into precisely sized pieces - to multitasking - setting the rice on one hob and stirring the sabzi on another to creativity - figuring out which spices to use or substitute - had the simultaneous effect of stimulating and calming me down. I soon found myself indulging in a cooking orgy before every set of exams, while A would lie on our bed and observe the ceiling.

We got back to India in time for Eid, and I volunteered to make the veg kebabs. My Inlaws have always had an open house on Eid, welcoming all their friends regardless of religion. Naturally therefore, the menu has to be a mix of veg and non-veg items to fulfil tradition as well as fill all their guests. Typically my MIL would make dry chholey and aloo tikkis for the vegetarians, while mutton kebabs would be made for the non-veggers. Biryani and plain rice would be available for anyone who stayed to lunch, along with her yummy Seviyan, which I have still not mastered.

MIL was a little uncertain of my cooking ability so she whipped up the tikki mix and kept it in reserve just in case. I had come across an intriguing recipe for kebabs made out of Chholia - green chickpeas - which always abound in the winter and decided to try that. It took a bit of work, but the kebabs were so delicious that even the non-veg guests gulped down as many of these as the non-veg kebabs. Thanks to Jiggs Kalra, if I remember correctly, the veg kebabs were the surprise hit of the day. Now we often have them in the winter since I love chholias and want to use them as much as possible in their all-too-brief season.

Chholia Kebabs
2 cups green chickpeas
1 grated red onion
1 inch finely minced ginger
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 inch stick cinnamon
1 tbsp coriander powder
1 tsp cumin powder
2-3 green chillies, finely chopped, or red chilli powder to taste
1/2 cup hung plain yoghurt
Salt to taste
Bread crumbs
Oil for frying

Put a little bit of oil ( 1/2 tbsp) on to heat in a wok. Add the coriander and cumin powder and cinnamon stick and then the chholia. Cook until the chholia is partially cooked and turn off the heat.
Remove the chholia from the pan, and cook the onion, ginger, garlic until well browned.
Mash these along with the chholia until finely blitzed.
Mix with the hung curd, salt, chillies/ chilli powder and bread crumbs, checking to see if the mixture holds its shape when moulded into a ball. If not, add more breadcrumbs.
Form the mixture into ping-pong sized balls and pat them flat.
Heat oil in a frying pan.
Shallow fry the kebabs on low heat until well-browned and crisp on the outside. They will remain soft and moist on the inside.
Serve hot with sweet tomato or mango chutney and green coriander chutneys, or as a side-dish with rotis and dal.